Kimi no Na Iowa
by Warp Ligia Obscura
Summary: KnNW AU/Continuation. The story didn't end when the two got together. When dark forces from the ocean emerge to threaten mankind, one of them will learn that when it was said that one might encounter something not quite human at twilight, all present might be forgiven for not considering that the entity in question might be oneself. OC x natural born Pacific!Iowa
1. Prologue

WARNING: Contains unavoidable _Kimi no Na Wa./your name._ spoilers.

* * *

Prologue

* * *

A small town girl and a city boy discover that they've been switching bodies. As they begin to get used to the routine and improving each other's' lives, it suddenly stops. In finding out why, they change the course of history. Events conspire to separate them, however, and it is not till years later that they finally reunite.

This is not that story.

That story happened, but it's history now. Something distant. Though the names and the setting are different, the way things played out for Ayaka and Uileag back then were similar enough to the original that those seeking to retread familiar ground should find Mitsuha and Taki instead. But please, let them have their happy ending.

No… one story ends, and another begins. Fate and the cosmos still play games with puny mortals, and are far from averse to the idea of reusing old pieces who thought their roles played out. When alien forces rise from the depths bent on the destruction of mankind, one such luminary must question who or what she really is.

After all, when Ms Yukino said, nearly 10 years ago, that one might encounter something not quite human at twilight, all present might be forgiven for not considering that the entity in question might be oneself.

* * *

Burning eyes gazed out over the dark waters, seeking, almost as if they could see the distant shore.

In a way, they could.

Their owner sniffed. The air… The air was subtly yet surely different from how it was like on the other side.

She did not need to be here, not need to be present in the material realm for this. It was perfectly possible for her to do what she had to do from the safety of where mortals could not hope to penetrate, not until they too joined the choir invisible.

She could have, but this was something she had to see for herself. It was not like the mortals could actually touch her and hers.

There was indeed hers, because around her in loose formation waited her faithful protectors. They had been apart on that day.

It had taken decades, and then the better part of a year since she had first manifested once more in this form, but they were finally all together again, as they should have been.

"Are we ready?" She asked. Her voice was echoing, ethereal.

"Hold," one of them said. Light glinted, seemingly reflected off something, as the speaker shifted in place, listening, sensing, gathering. "The numbers are not yet right."

She turned now to face the one on her right, who stood still, seemingly placid. The eyes told otherwise, twitching constantly, roiling with implacable hatred. "They must pay. They must pay. They all must pay," her companion muttered unceasingly.

"Take heart. They will," she said.

Enemies everywhere. On one side, a band of cowards, knowing full well they could not succeed in a fair fight, had struck from the shadows, hypocritically dishonourable for all their culture praised it as a virtue. For that perfidy, they had fittingly burned in newborn suns, yet it was too far short of what their crimes deserved. On the other, weaklings who shied from finishing the fight, extending mercy to a foe who deserved none, they had conspired to spare a false emperor the punishment he was due, and even offered friendship and a helping hand afterwards. There were many more who, by continuing to tolerate or even welcome the former's existence, made themselves complicit in its crimes, even peoples who had suffered under its conquering iron fist. Its ancient foes, too, refused to see to its end in blood and fire, preferring to flap jaws and toy with money instead.

Of all her foes, though, these two took priority. There would be plenty of blood and fire tonight.

"The numbers agree. All units in position," the earlier speaker suddenly declared, cutting into her thoughts.

"Wait one." She set aside optical, infrared, radar and sonar, the senses of the material realm, and peered beyond. With an effort of will, she set her mind on discerning the skeins of fate, following them as far as she could, trying to seeing how the first blow of long-awaited justice would play out.

Some fuzziness, but well within tolerable margin of error given the not entirely metaphorical fog of war.

Good enough. She had worked with far less before. How limited she had once been!

{Furi Original Soundtrack feat. Carpenter Brut: What We Fight For}

"Very good," she finally said once she was satisfied, and cast her voice out like she was speaking to an audience. "Remember tonight what we fight for. Our two main enemies are cowards in their own ways. For one, night has fallen on a day of remembrance, yet it is a memorial that remains a mockery to the fallen so long as their killers exist. We will tolerate neither the murderer nor those who failed to properly avenge the murders, for to do so is to condone the crime."

A pause.

"Let us begin to set things right."

All around them, previously shrouded by the darkness, eyes began to light up. Green, red, gold, blue, combinations thereof with hazy emanations. Subtle and well-spaced enough that an airborne observer who knew not what to look for would have missed it, yet obvious to those at sea level and in on the plan. Not that she would have feared overmuch the possibility of being spotted; the time of judgment had been set to after dinner, the better that those sated by food and drink might be groggy, while those who had yet to partake would be too bothered by their gnawing stomachs to pay full attention. Even if there were those precious few souls that retained their full faculties, the tools man relied on would struggle to see anything amiss until it was too late.

Flight decks raised to ready positions. Maws opened on creatures that looked like a twisted hybrid of xenomorph and cephalopod.

"Tonight, we ascend the mountain."

{Advance track to 2:55}

Bullets roared from barrels that ran the length of flight decks, exploding in mid-air and expanding into ball-like creatures with demonic features, bombs or torpedoes slung beneath their bodies by machinery. From the vaguely squidlike creatures emerged what could more easily be called planes, yet even those looked armoured more by chitin or something alien and organic than metal. Whatever their differences in appearance, though, they formed up with clear purpose and zoomed off into the distance. Beneath them, the other, lesser subordinates went to flank speed and sped off too, leaving her personal guard behind.

"Let justice be done when we make the heavens fall."

* * *

君の名アイオワ。

Kimi no Na Iowa.

Your (Name is) Iowa.

" _I have finally remembered you, whom I am about to lose yet again."_

Original concept:

Kensuke Tanaka (Kantai Collection)

Makoto Shinkai (Kimi no Na Wa./Your Name.)

Morgane of the Mists (Pacific)

Etc

Art:

bapjart/be-ta

melisaongmiqin

Written by:

WarpObscura

max_and_emilytate

* * *

… and shitty writing, questionable decisions, sociopolitical naivete...

No betas were used in the making of this chapter.

Also available at SpaceBattles Dot Com and Sufficient Velocity.

Iowa in question uses Pacific design by Jeanex/November, not canon; shipgirl designs will also draw from Warship Girls/Zhan Jian Shao Nyu and originals.


	2. Chapter 1

Max_and_emilytate (MAEt) and I were very unsure if we wanted to keep this chapter, rewrite or trim it into a brief flashback or mention somewhere later, because as much as we joke about this whole endeavour being a zeroth draft, this chapter in particular feels like a negative first. No thanks to suffering from excruciating amounts of "Do you even US Navy". Any help unfucking this would be appreciated, though we haven't the foggiest how we would repay it.

* * *

CHAPTER ONE

* * *

Shortly afterwards

* * *

Naval Base Ventura County burned.

{XCOM: Enemy Unknown OST: Arrival}

Even this far inland - not that much was truly out of reach with hostile airpower around - the booming of cannon still sounded worryingly close, and flashes lit up the night sky.

In a temporary medical holding area, Chief Utilitiesman Curtis Harvey tried his best to make his a worried fatherly gaze rather than a glare fit to burn a hole through the junior Civil Engineering Corps officer-in-training lying on a cot beside him. "Sir, why did you do that?"

"Chief?" The young ensign, only 23 if he remembered correctly, tried to straighten up, but pain caused him to wince and slump again. The sight reminded him uncomfortably of his older boy.

"Going back in once would have been dutiful. Twice, admirable. 12 times was just reckless." The last part came out tight, trying not to show too much anger or worry overtly.

He mostly succeeded.

"I couldn't leave anyone behind, Chief," Ensign Uileag Shane Greer said.

Curtis did his level best not to outwardly curse. There were stupid butterbars who thought they were more clever than they really were, thought they knew everything. There were malicious ones, in it for the eventual power to lord over others. Some were even cunning enough to not make it obvious where someone who could actually do something about it could see.

The ones he hated most of all were the heroes, or wannabes thereof. Some genuinely wanted to take the world on their shoulders; some did so just to get their names in the papers. Right now, he was not sure which he was looking at.

Greer did not look like much. Red hair singed from his recent ordeal, fair skin marred by bruises, blue eyes dulled from the pain he was in. His features and voice made no attempt to hide his Irish ancestry. He seemed vaguely familiar, but Curtis had not the faintest idea where he had seen the young man before. In casting into the depths of his memory about it, his mind wandered back to how things had gotten this way.

The attack had come seemingly out of nowhere.

The drone of propeller engines, but seemingly no planes to use them, except tiny spectres flitting through the air.

A series of sudden explosions in the moonlit night.

The whistling of inbound bombs and shells piercing the air.

Cannon from a century past ruining the quiet from close.

Way too close.

Where were the patrols?

Crippled and on fire if not outright sunk, hit first as it turned out. They had never seen their murderers coming. Neither had the men and women who had been either asleep or at leisure, unprepared for a direct attack. Who, really, would have expected one not long after dinner?

And they were not the only ones hit; the attackers had destroyed the comm tower quickly enough, but could not cut off other communications, which soon painted a grim picture. Pearl and bases all along the coasts were being attacked, and there just were not enough planes to respond to all. It did not help that anything that flew too low and slow was either bounced by things too small to see coming with both eye and radar or mauled by more flak than…

Curtis winced internally. The fact that his line of thought had jumped to "a celebrity tweeting the wrong thing" probably said volumes about how much everyone had been expecting something to actually happen. It did not help that the sources of said anti-air fire were proving maddeningly elusive.

As for how Greer had gotten this way…

" _Sure, take care of yourself! Night. I love you."_

 _Uileag hung up and put away his phone, only to be confronted by an annoyance as he returned to the rec room._

" _You can't keep putting it off forever, Shane."_

 _Uileag gave the stink eye. "Are we still on this, Mike?"_

" _Hell yeah we are!" Michael Granger's wide grin of exposed practically sparkling white teeth, contrasting with his dark skin. "Friend of my friend tells me your girl's a looker. Seems, degree in architecture aside, you actually can see more than structural beauty. What, scared we'll snatch her away from you?"_

" _Don't say 'we', Granger," another person cut in disapprovingly._

" _Aw c'mon, Hec! You mean you're not curious at all?"_

 _Hector Ramirez shook his head from where he was seated. "I only showed you a photograph of my girlfriend because you were pissing me off."_

" _Still counts as a win!" Turning back to Uileag, Mike said, "Orrrrr you could hurry up and put a ring on it and I won't bother you any longer."_

" _I've only known her for less than a year, I think?"_

 _He got a "So?" look for that._

" _Though I might have known her from somewhere before…" Uileag ground his teeth. "Fine, I give." He pulled out his phone from a pocket, turned the screen on, found what was being demanded of him and passed it over._

" _Hah! Finally gotcha-wha?"_

" _Huh, something actually surprises Granger?" A female voice interrupted._

" _No, really, Glads, this is some trippy shit."_

 _The ponytail Gladys Smith wore her blonde hair in smacked Mike's head by accident on purpose as she leaned over to see what had her Civil Engineering Corps Officer School classmate so worked up. "I keep telling you, it's Gladys. Stop shortening-is that a skyscraper?!"_

" _Grr…"_

 _Two heads snapped up to look at a growling Uileag._

" _Knock it off. She has a name, if you please - Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai."_

" _Ayaka Godai…" Hector rolled the name around his tongue as he finally acquiesced to look at the phone. It was displaying a photo of Uileag holding hands with a brown-eyed, black-haired woman with a discreet mole under her right eye. Both were smiling at the camera. Uileag was quite tall himself, but she had a full head on him. Her long hair would have been a hime cut but for the updo braid in it, held together by some kind of blue braided cord. A crystal star pendant hung from a necklace. "She's Japanese? What's up with the middle names?"_

 _Uileag blinked. "Eh… I asked her once. Even her mother hadn't been too sure."_

" _Frankly Shane, you didn't say, I couldn't tell what she was." Mike raised placating hands to Uileag before the latter could express incredulous displeasure. "All sincere mode there, man." He took a second look nevertheless. Beautiful enough even on the bare minimum of makeup he could tell she was using, nice figure, but he would not call her the head-turner he had been told she was. Oh well, guess even the grapevine had to get it wrong once in awhile._

" _Why do we keep him around?" Uileag asked, leaning back into the chair, but his teeth were still set._

 _Hector shrugged. "I have no idea."_

" _Too useful to jettison?" Gladys suggested._

" _Aw, you guys are no fun. Geez!" Mike stretched his arm out to return Uileag his phone._

" _In all frankness, Shane," Gladys said, "you two look good toge-"_

 _Everything blew up._

 _{XCOM: Enemy Unknown OST: Terror Upon Us}_

 _Uileag awoke to pain and the low, blood red of emergency lighting. Groaning, he tentatively wiggled his toes and fingers, then patted himself down when that did not give any adverse reactions. Everything seemed intact, nothing stuck in him that should not have been. He made to get up from where he had been thrown onto the floor, then blinked at the hole in the roof._

 _It had been such a nice day too. The sun had been shining brightly, as if the cosmos cared nothing for the affairs of puny Earthlings commemorating the 81st anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks. It made maintaining a properly somber atmosphere that much harder. Even as night fell, the skies had remained clear. No one wanted literal rain on their parade, but would a solemn overcast sky have been too much to ask for?_

 _Uileag forced the stray thoughts from his mind and got back to matters. Whatever had hit them had thankfully been far off enough that he did not seem to have any real injuries._

 _The same could not be said for the others, and Uileag had to fight off a wave of nausea. Mike looked easily the worst off, with a terrifyingly large piece of shrapnel lodged in his gut._

 _Something told Uileag it was rather unwise to be moving the injured when he had no medical training to know how bad off they really were and what he might be aggravating._

 _Something else told him that every moment the Corpsmen wasted going into this building in order to retrieve the wounded was a moment less time said wounded could be getting medical attention._

 _His mind made up, he carefully lifted Mike into a fireman's carry and started hobbling out of the building. As much of an ass and busybody as Mike was, the thought had never crossed Uileag's mind to just leave him._

 _At the entrance, Uileag chanced upon a group of constructionmen milling about aimlessly. On seeing him, they froze and stared. Uileag was unsure how much of that was due to surprise and horror at Mike's state and how much was the drilled-in reaction to the sudden appearance of two officers, even ones as junior as the two of them._

" _Over here. Stay low!" Once they were huddled close in squats, he asked next, "Who's in charge? Where're your superiors?"_

 _They rapidly exchanged looks before one of them, Winnfeld by his nametag, said, "We can't find them, Sir!"_

 _Almost literally biting down on the urge to offer some incisive but unproductive commentary, Uileag instead said, "Never mind. Sitrep!"_

 _Another bunch of furtive glances were exchanged. Then another._

 _Uileag knew facepalming would be most unprofessional, but these numbskulls were testing his patience. "Put Ensign Granger on the ground first." He gestured with his free hand, and two of them ran forward to take hold of Mike. "Gently. Don't jostle his wounds." A third gingerly extended a hand towards the shrapnel stuck in Mike and had to be waved off. "Don't touch that."_

" _But Sir!"_

" _Without proper medical care, all that'll do is make him bleed out faster." With Mike safely down and out of his hands, he turned back to the constructionmen who were unoccupied. "Who's tried contacting the clinic to tell them we have wounded here?"_

" _Sir, lines are either busy or down, Sir."_

 _Of course they were, because that would have been too easy. Plan B it was then. "Who's most familiar with where the clinic is?" When no response came, Uileag took a deep breath and started scanning the lot, until he settled on one. "Driver. Are you familiar with where the clinic is?"_

" _Er, yes, Sir."_

" _Good. Take Kiddo with you. Tell them we have wounded and bring them here. Double time, and keep your heads down!"_

" _Yes, Sir!"_

 _After they started running off, Uileag singled out two more. "Candie, White, get to HQ and tell them we've been hit here too."_

" _Sir!"_

 _With those two important tasks out of the way, Uileag tried to think of what to do next. His thoughts quickly turned to Gladys and Hector, still in the building and wounded, and he rose._

" _Sir, where are you going?" One of the constructionmen asked._

 _Uileag nearly stopped there and then. What was he doing? These headless chickens needed someone to give them direction. He should be making best speed for the nearest shelter, the better to safely take the measure of the situation and make informed decisions in the absence of a more experienced and higher-ranking officer, not running back into an already-attacked, structurally-compromised building._

 _But that's never been you, something told him. Sensible, responsible people don't go tearing around the mountains searching for a small town they don't even know the name of, but can identify only by the scenery._

Where did that come from? Uileag started to ask himself, but the fleeting thought was gone before he could even grasp it, never mind begin to figure out what it meant.

Shaking off the fugue, he said, "There are more wounded inside! We need to get them out!" Then he was gone.

The remainder stared at the corridor he had disappeared into, then at each other. One of them made to follow.

"Where the Hell are you going, Schultz?!"

Schultz whirled to glare at the speaker, right index finger coming up to tap his temple insistently. "Corpsmen can't help the wounded if there are no wounded out here needing help!" With that parting shot, he ran in.

"Stupid ensigns and stupider people following them... Fuck us all," someone muttered as the others made to enter the building too, leaving only a token rear party to wait for the Corpsmen.

And so the ensign had led the hapless constructionmen 12 times back into the building. He had committed its layout to memory, and that was now paying off as they methodically combed it in search of the wounded, unceasing even as the Corpsmen and proper rescue teams finally arrived. He would probably have had kept going, too, if not for what happened next.

" _Stop! Does anyone hear that?"_

" _Sir?"_

" _Sir, no, si-"_

" _Back! Back! Ba-"_

 _Uileag's hurriedly-shouted order to retreat bought some precious distance; nevertheless, the explosion was still near enough to blow him back into the constructionmen behind him, bowling them over even as he blacked out._

{XCOM: Enemy Unknown OST: The Alien Underbelly}

"Something must be watching over you, Sir," the Corpsman attending to the ensign had said when he had regained consciousness. He had been brought to a common medical holding area and triaged while he had been out; despite the blast, he was apparently still intact enough that he was considered low-priority compared to Mike and the others, and was languishing somewhere near the end of the queue along with the rest of the noncritical patients. The senior chief hospital corpsman, a longtime friend of Curtis's, had noticed him with his officers nowhere in sight and begged a favour to have him keep an eye out while his overburdened boys handled the serious cases.

"It-"

"Sir?" The ensign's continued speech had jerked Curtis back to the present.

"Before you ask, Chief, I wasn't doing it to impress anyone." Curtis barely caught the whispered follow-up: "Certainly not my father."

Father? Why would he bring up-

And then it clicked. Why Ensign Greer looked familiar, why it seemed like he had heard the surname before - because Curtis had. His father was now-retired Senior Chief Boatswain's Mate Diarmuid Greer, last with _Theodore Roosevelt_. They had crossed paths a few times when Curtis had been at NAS North Island some time back. Yet it also became apparent why Curtis had not made the connection at first; though they had the same red hair, unlike the sharp, at times harsh lines and wiry form of his old man, the younger Greer had the eyes and softer features of his mother, who had come along for certain events.

Diarmuid had been a strict sort; not the constantly screaming and raving kind that bad fiction had burned into the civilian cultural consciousness as the stereotypical NCO, but he always demanded the utmost of those under him and was stingy with praise and affirmation. He got results, no one doubted that or he would never have made senior chief, but there were those who joked, after triple checking that the older Greer was nowhere within earshot and had no tattletales nearby, that he was born the wrong race, because he would fit right in the Asian father stereotype.

The joke did not seem so funny now, hearing the man's own son try to deny that seeking his father's approval had anything to do with his foolhardy actions.

"No, Sir, of course not." Curtis thanked his years of experience dealing with junior officers for the straight face and matter-of-fact tone he was able to call on. No need to openly disagree with the young man right here and now; if they all lived through this, he could have a word with the right person to get the ear of the ensign's superior.

"I'll be fine, Chief," the ensign said. He almost sounded convincing. "Go attend to the others." He tried to smile reassuringly. It came out more as a rictus.

In Ensign Greer's weakened state it came out more as a firm suggestion than an order, but Curtis saw it for what it was intended to be. "Yes, Sir."

He moved on down the line to check on the rest. Next to Ensign Greer was a builder second class surnamed Lau, who Curtis discreetly told to keep an eye on the junior officer.

It was a few more places down the line when the ensign coughed, wet and throaty.

"Shit! Chief!"

Something about this one had set alarm bells ringing, even from a distance, and Curtis's head was already snapping around even as BU2 Lau shattered the near-silence of the holding area.

There was blood on Ensign Greer's shirt where there had been none shortly before. Even as Curtis stared, the ensign coughed again, and droplets of blood followed.

Shit. How had that gone unnoticed? Furthermore, it should not have been that bad, unless…

Unless the ensign had already been caught in the earlier blast that had incapacitated his classmates and had somehow not realised even as he did his saving people thing.

Curtis firmly quashed the reflexive thought of "stupid butterbars" before he accidentally gave voice to it. Nevertheless, someone's head was going to roll for an oversight of this magnitude.

He made his decision quickly. As he ran past the cot with the ensign on the way to where the Corpsmen were holding the critical cases, he shouted, "Lau! Keep Ensign Greer awake and talking! I'm going to get the Corpsmen!"

"Yes, Chief!" Lau said.

"Chief, wait," Ensign Greer panted.

"Sir?"

"Tell… tell Ayaka I'm sorry, Chief," the ensign rasped out.

Curtis had no idea who that was. The girlfriend? "You tell her yourself, Sir!" He retorted nevertheless without missing a beat. "Stay with us! You're going to be fine! Just fine!"

* * *

Authors' notes:

We were also considering whether it should have been presented in chronological order.

No betas were used in the making of this chapter.

Oh yeah, anyone who doesn't mind reading raw, negative first draft scene ideas, feel free to follow maet-rambles DOT tumblr DOT com, where MAEt compiles all the brainstormed ideas we come up with. Not everything there will make it into the final release, and because it's put up as soon as the idea appears it's all out of chronological order and full of spoilers, but if you don't mind, you can entertain yourself. All worksafe.

* * *

Frequently Asked Questions:

1\. What depiction of the abyssals are you going with?  
Game-compliant as far as possible.

2\. You mentioned Pacific in the original concepts list. Is this purely canon and Pacific?  
We'll also be using Warship Girls designs and some original. Will be mixing. This is **not** compatible with the Pacific cosmology, though.

3\. Is this a shipfic?  
Can you really call this a shipfic, I didn't see any UST and courtship or anything? But in all seriousness, yes. We'll try not to screw up too much...

4\. WTF was that "skeins of fate" thing?  
MAGIC, SON! ... In all seriousness, we're putting a bit more emphasis on the magic side of things than we see in many KC fics.

5\. Why not just use Taki, Mitsuha and the rest of the canon _your name_ crew, rather than do all this name-changing and setting-switching nonsense?  
We felt that intruding into canon would be harder to make work than would be worth trying. Furthermore, certain scenes of this fic only really work when set in NYC, rather than in Tokyo.

* * *

Applicable Headcanons:

Taki and Mitsuha didn't regain all their memories of what happened when they finally reunited at the stairs.

Toshiki eventually reconciled with his family after the evacuation of Itomori.

* * *

Next time on Kimi no Na Iowa:

The phone slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers and was only saved by landing on the cushion of the adjacent chair.

* * *

Yoshimichi flinched visibly. "No, it can't be," he muttered almost inaudibly.

* * *

"No. Bad memories."

* * *

Uileag was staring again.

* * *

"How did I not notice before?"


	3. Chapter 2

Authors' Notes: The miracle never happen. No one who can into US Navy came to help, so I guess we're sticking with the still-FUBAR depiction used in Chapter One.

This chapter dedicated to the 47 sailors who lost their lives in Iowa's turret two explosion on April 19th, 1989.

By the way, FanFiction Dot Net readers, if you're wondering why you're getting this later than those reading on SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity or Tumblr, we post the chapters there first in the hopes of getting critique we can act on. It's not because we hate you.

* * *

CHAPTER TWO

* * *

A few hours later

* * *

Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai woke, roused by the ringing of her phone.

Bleary-eyed, the 26 year-old slipped out of bed and treaded gingerly over to the desk where the iPhone 9 was placed, mumbling incoherently at the early hour. It was not even time for her to start getting ready for work.

It took her sleep-addled brain a bit longer to realise that the ringtone was the one assigned to only a very specific group.

The contact name displayed, "Greer Home", was one of those in it.

"Sis," Ciarán James Greer said, sounding strangely serious, as soon as she picked up. "Bro's been hurt."

It did not quite sink in. "Sorry?"

"Someone… Something? carried out attacks on the navy bases at Hawaii and along the East and West Coast. Hueneme was one of them, and Uileag got caught. We just got the, what do you call them, the notification people, and I called as soon as I could."

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - Disappeared Town}

The phone slipped from suddenly nerveless fingers and was only saved by landing on the cushion of the adjacent chair.

"Sis? Sis?"

Trembling, Ayaka stooped to press the speakerphone button, not trusting herself to hold the phone. "I-I'm here. I just spoke to him last night before I went to bed early. We…"

When she failed to continue, Uileag's younger brother retook control of the conversation. "It's okay. None of us did." Darkly, Ayaka thought he even sounded like he was actually okay, or at least was much better at projecting a strong front. "We can't do anything right now because of the lockdown on nonessential travel, but Mamai and Athair will be taking the liberty of including you in the tickets we'll be booking to see him where he's warded at Lemoore. Is that fine with you?"

"Yes… yes, go ahead."

"Got it. It might be a while though. No idea when the lockdown will lift. We'll contact you once we get them."

"Okay."

"Take care, and don't worry too much. Bro's strong. He'll get through this." There was the tiniest waver in his voice at this, though, just the smallest crack in the confidence he was showing. "Oh yeah… they told me Bro said he was sorry. Wanted to apologise to you."

Ayaka swallowed nervously. That did not sound good at all. "Yes… Yes."

"Bye."

"B-bye."

Ciarán hung up, and Ayaka staggered back to her bed, where she stared at her hands, unable to get her rampaging emotions and thoughts under control. She laid herself down, but did not manage to get any more sleep afterwards.

A dark cloud seemed to hang over the whole of New York City on her morning commute, not helped by the presence of the National Guard at almost every corner. The normally already tight-lipped crowd seemed even more low-spirited and sullen, the mood positively oppressive. She supposed they could not be blamed; more than a few were probably wondering if this mysterious attacker would be going for cities next. Then she wondered if there were others in this crowd who also knew people caught in the attacks, and that conjured a vision of Uileag's mauled form in a hospital bed, and her mood plummeted again.

She looked down at her phone once more. Both traditional news and social media were abuzz with a whole lot of speculation in lieu of concrete information; the US Navy had confirmed that there had been serious military attacks on the bases at Hawaii and the coasts, but been short on details pending further investigation and ongoing hostilities. There were some crackpot theories that something had happened to mitigate the damage, something about water-walking witches with weapons, but not many people were taking those seriously.

The choice of date… Ayaka wondered if the attackers had an odd sense of timing. Attacking on, of all the times, the 82nd anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attacks was more than a little strange. A number of talking heads were already calling it the "New Date of Infamy".

No one was really in the mood for work at the office. There were people who had lost or wounded and had already applied for leave even if they could not yet go to their loved ones; others were on edge and Ayaka was not the only one jumping at every notification on her phone. A day passed with agonising slowness before the lockdown was lifted. She spent the night packing in preparation; when one was 6'8", no heels needed thank you very much, and struggled to find clothing even in the men's section - sewing your own clothes only went so far - travelling light was difficult. Sleep was fitful.

It was almost a relief the next day when the notification turned out to finally be Ciarán calling. "Sis? Plane's at 6.00pm, Saturday," Ciarán said without preamble. "Sorry we couldn't get anything earlier."

"No, it's okay. You must be more worried than I am."

"Aye. Thanks for asking. We got return tickets for next Sun too. That fine by you?"

No, Ayaka wanted to say. She wanted to stay longer, be by his side as long as possible. Yet a small part of her pointed out the foresight of the Greers. If Uileag was that badly hurt that the navy had sent official notification, it probably was not something that he would recover from quickly, and it would be hard to justify taking so much time away from work at such short notice. "Yes," she eventually uttered softly.

"Mm. Okay. We'll see you at JFK at 4.00, send you the details ASAP. See you on Sat."

"Bye."

The boss, a veteran himself, was understanding, and let her take the next week off without many questions.

With the flight confirmed, Ayaka realised in her hurry that there was someone she had yet to inform - her family. She quickly rectified that error after another worry-filled workday.

"Hello?"

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - Persuading Mayor}

Oh. " _Tousan._ " It was her father, and she switched to Japanese. She always felt more comfortable speaking to her family in her mother tongue, even if they could speak English perfectly well. {Is Gran there?}

{Give me a moment,} Yoshimichi Godai said, his voice slightly older and rougher after the 9 years since Fafnir. {Mother! Ayaka's on the line!}

The family home phone was switched to speaker just in time to catch the tail end of an affirmative.

{Good evening, Ayaka,} Ichiyo Shirokaze said shortly afterwards, her voice still remarkably strong for a 91-year old.

Ayaka took a moment to compose herself, then said, {Gran, Dad, I won't be able to come by tomorrow. Uileag got wounded when Port Hueneme was hit and I'm following the Greers to go see him.}

There were sharp, dismayed intakes of breath on the other end of the line. Ichiyo had quickly taken a shine to the prospective grandson-in-law; as for Yoshimichi…

" _Gran, Dad, this is Uileag, my boyfriend."_

 _Uileag bowed a perfect 90 degrees. "Good evening, Madam Shirokaze, Mr Godai. Pleased to meet you."_

" _Good evening. My pleasure," Ichiyo said while nodding in acknowledgment._

 _Yoshimichi flinched visibly. "No, it can't be," he muttered almost inaudibly._

" _Dad?" Ayaka asked._

" _Sir?" Uileag was confused. "Did I do something wrong?"_

 _Yoshimichi shook himself. "No, sorry. My mind wandered to something unpleasant. Sit, sit!" He gestured to a sofa._

 _Ayaka was not entirely convinced by the hastily-rebuilt facade of normality._

The 63-year old had been initially wary in a way that could not quite be attributed merely to fatherly protectiveness, but had eventually come around.

{Do you want me to go down too?} Yoshimichi finally broke the silence by asking.

You're saying this now? Part of Ayaka thought, anger and resentment she had thought long gone abruptly bubbling to the surface. Where were you when Kagami and I needed you during our younger days?

Another part of her slammed the first to the ground and kept it there with a mental boot. What are you going on about? Dad tried, didn't he? It asked coldly. When Gran told him to get lost, he tried to get us to go with him and we sided with her instead. We made our beds and we had to lie in them.

A third part of her distantly thought, This stress over Uileag's condition is doing me no good. So much for all the therapy that was supposed to have helped me set this aside, to help me relearn to see him as "Dad" rather than a distant "Father".

Verbally, she instead managed to utter, {Yes, please,} voice betraying none of her thoughts.

{Okay, I'll get my own plane ticket and be there. Just tell me where.}

{Okay.}

{Sorry, Ayaka. I need to stay here and look after the shrine. I hope he'll be fine.}

The shrine. Ah, yes. It had taken a lot of effort and bureaucratic headaches, but the family had managed to acquire a plot of land for a new Shirokaze Shrine to replace the one that had been destroyed with Imamura. The documents and records, though, were a write off; Ichiyo had quickly found trying to dictate what she could remember an exercise in frustration, even with Ayaka dropping by every week and the use of Siri.

{I hope so too, Gran. I hope so too.}

The talk turned to chitchat that Ayaka eventually excused herself from. After another sleepless night, Saturday finally arrived, and she was at the airport on the dot.

Senior Chief Boatswain's Mate (Retired) Diarmuid Greer could be mistaken for a sunbaked Liam Neeson from a distance. The red hair he had passed to his son was thinning and shot through with white, but the way he carried himself and the flint in his brown eyes still commanded respect even in civvies, not that he was shabby. In fact, Ayaka sometimes wondered if he starched his casual clothing too by the crisp look they always had.

"Ayaka. Good, you're on time." His gruff voice sounded unflappable, rock steady. Probably good traits for a NCO to have, except that he might have taken it a bit too far. He was almost inscrutable.

" _At least your dad had the excuse of being physically absent," Uileag had said when the topic came up. "Mine was around when he wasn't out at sea, but he was always distant. Saw me more as a recruit than a son."_

Mrs Siobhan Greer was brown-haired, starting to go to seed as old age approached and her son had inherited her blue eyes. Bending to return her hug, Ayaka could feel her practically vibrating with worry, far from her usual warm and jovial self.

Like his brother, Ciarán was a blue-eyed redhead, but he could not be more different. Combed, well-maintained hair to Uileag's untameable mop, but otherwise easy and relaxed. He seemed a bit more tense given the circumstances, but it was not enough to completely obliterate the smile on his face.

"Hey, Sis."

And there was that too. It had not been long into her relationship with Uileag before he had started calling her as such. When asked why, well-

" _Why not?" He had said. "If you two get together, good, I'm ahead of the game! And if you don't, well, I'll just pass it on to whoever's next!"_

The memory almost made her roll her eyes in amused remembrance. Almost.

"Where're your sisters?"

"Oh, you know, they'll be making their own way down."

"We should go," Mr Greer said, and off they went.

Ayaka admired the ability of the Greer men to sleep on the plane at a time like this. She vaguely recalled something Uileag had once told her about soldiers learning to catch every scrap of sleep they could get, something the retired NCO had clearly taken to heart. Ciarán was Ciarán, and that was all the explanation needed. She herself was sick with worry, constantly fidgeting, and was fairly certain that even the generous legroom of a comfortable first class seat would not have been able to lure her into dreamland, never mind economy seating. Mrs Greer evidently shared her sentiments, and a few attempts at idle talk quickly proved abortive. The opportunity to stretch her legs during the stopover on the way to Fresno did not help much. After they finally landed, it was on to the hotel, much too late to go to the hospital; yet another restless night passed and they were off to the hospital as soon as visiting hours permitted.

Ayaka took a few steps into Naval Hospital Lemoore and froze.

{Halo Original Soundtrack - Library Suite}

Mrs Greer was the first to notice. Though the hospital reception area was still a picture of crowded chaos and the scent of fear and anxious sweat days on, she was pretty sure it was not due to surprise at the sight. "Ayaka?"

"Sis?" Ciarán asked.

"You two go ahead first, find out where Uileag's warded," Mrs Greer told Mr Greer and Ciarán as she gently dragged Ayaka to the side, out of the path of anyone who might rush in through the main entrance. "We'll catch up."

Mr Greer went on; after another concerned look, Ciarán followed.

Ayaka eventually shook herself out of her fugue.

"Are you okay?"

"No. Bad memories," Ayaka admitted in a hesitant whisper.

"You don't have to talk about it if you're not ready to."

"No, it's fine." Ayaka expelled a breath loudly as she started walking again. "My mother died of illness when I was 11. She was bedridden for the last few months of her life, and I spent almost every day at the hospital back then." Hers was a distant look. "Even 15 years on, I've never managed to wholly shake the association."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Mrs Greer said in a small voice. "I guess today's circumstances aren't helping."

"No, not really," Ayaka agreed. After a hesitation, she managed, "We're-we're finally here, though, so let's not waste any more time when we can finally find out how things really are."

"ICU, Ward C, bed 53," Mr Greer said as they approached, then led the way.

Ayaka was not entirely surprised to hear that Uileag was in intensive care, but she would be lying if she claimed the news did nothing for her anxiety. She was not sure what to expect, but the omnipresent misery and sight of heavily-injured sailors whose beds they passed on the way did not help her nerves. Some were swaddled like mummies, stuck full of tubes and needles like mutant hedgehogs - Ayaka cursed the involuntary comparison her treacherous mind had made to her favourite animal - and occasionally outright missing limbs. Ciarán and Mrs Greer's faces were developing a green tinge, one she was sure she shared, and the smell of antiseptic, medication and dressings not replaced as frequently as they should have been by overburdened nurses did not help. As for Mr Greer, she was not sure if anything really affected him any more. He had probably seen worse in his decades anyway.

She tried to steel herself for what she might see as the bed numbers began ticking towards 53, and for a moment-

 _She was 11 again._

 _Young, small, cute as a button. If you had told Ayaka Godai back then that the sapling would have grown into a giant beanstalk, she would have laughed at the notion._

 _There was no joy to be found in her this day, though, as her father pushed open the door in the hospital, Ayaka and her younger sister following close behind._

 _{Ah, Yoshimichi,} Nijimi Shirokaze said in Japanese from the bed. {Ayaka-_ chan, _Kagami_ -chan. _How was school today?}_

 _Ayaka's mother looked like death warmed over. Hers was a pale, gaunt figure that made her look well beyond her 30-something years. Some of Imamura's inhabitants said that she had the wisdom of a much older sage; now, Ayaka's morbid and treacherous hyperactive imagination said, she actually looked the part._

 _She was smiling, or trying to. It might have fooled Kagami, but Ayaka was a bit too old for that._

 _{It was fine,} Ayaka said noncommittally._

 _In all frankness, what could she have said? {I feel so helpless seeing you like this. I wish there was something I could do}?_

She blinked and the image cleared.

After all the horrible images her imagination had been conjuring, Uileag's appearance seemed almost disappointingly underwhelming, and Ayaka's spirits began to rise in the hope that it was not as bad as she had thought it would have been. His body was one big bruise, and he was on a ventilator, but at least it was not crushed and missing limbs, gaping wounds, broken and exposed bone, leaking sores, structurally superfluous new behinds-

Oh. There was someone talking.

"The Greer family?" A medical officer approached.

"Yes," Mr Greer said. "How is my son?"

{Halo Original Soundtrack - Trace Amounts}

The woman visibly steeled herself. "Massive internal trauma."

Just like that, Ayaka's mood plummeted once more.

The surgeons had done what they could, but it was still very much up in the air as to whether he would make it. There was a tiny silver lining, though; the so-called luck of the Irish had come through for him. With no fractures, severed nerves, spine damage and minimal oxygen deprivation, if he lived, he almost certainly would eventually regain full functionality. If he did not and his organs failed after all, he would die. There was no halfway point of alive but crippled in this case, for better or worse.

It was little reassurance. There was something else being said, but Ayaka caught none of that. She staggered to a nearby seat and collapsed into it, mind a chaotic whirlpool full of doom and gloom. Every attempt at thinking rationally, grasping for a useful thought, slipped through her hands like water through a sieve, one that was otherwise superb at trapping all too familiar feelings of helplessness and uselessness. Out the corner of her eye, she distantly noticed Mr Greer taking a call, Mrs Greer and Ciarán sticking close to him. The medical officer had apparently gone on to another frantic-looking family.

She was not sure how much time passed like this.

Sounds.

Rapid, tense, discordant.

Eventually, low, insistent conversation somehow drew Ayaka out of her thoughts, and she looked up to see Mr and Mrs Greer arguing to one side. A somewhat disconcerting sight, given how they had seemed quite harmonious whenever she had been over for dinner. Quarreling in Irish at that. Presumably to hide what they were saying from eavesdroppers, though their strident tones gave some big hints to any listener that it was not positive talk, even if one was unable to understand a word. A stray thought had Ayaka wondering if they had forgotten what she and Uileag had learned soon after they had started dating.

" _You…" Uileag stared disbelievingly at her. "You understood what I was saying?!"_

 _{Yes.} Ayaka nodded as she responded in Irish._

 _{But how? Why?} Prompted, Uileag made the switch to his mother tongue too._

 _{I… Don't know, actually.} Ayaka spent a few moments trying to think, but nothing came to mind. {I don't remember having taken Irish classes before.}_

 _{You wouldn't have any reason to, either, not coming from a Japanese background. No one uses Gaeilge for business too.} His gaze grew inquisitive. {Your delivery is flawless. You could pass for a native.}_

 _{Oh, er, thank you.} Ayaka blushed._

 _{You're a very interesting person, Ayaka.} Uileag barely stopped himself from scratching the back of his head at the awkward… compliment?_

Ayaka found herself listening in despite a lifetime of proprietous upbringing trying to make her refrain.

{Well, he's a hero now! Are you happy? Are you finally happy?} Mrs Greer said, jolting Ayaka out of her recollections.

{I-}

She was evidently not having any of Mr Greer's potential excuses or justifications. {You drilled all that blarney about duty and responsibility and what-not into his head so damn well and deep he goes and nearly gets himself killed trying to live up to it! You heard what else the doctors were saying, right? Right?!}

The tirade that followed was a terrifying display that Ayaka recoiled from. She had no idea Mrs Greer was capable of such ferocity.

Evidently, neither had Mr Greer, for hardened ex-NCO was frantically giving ground in the face of enraged mother.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," Ciarán said as he settled into the seat beside Ayaka.

"I-I've never seen your parents like this before," Ayaka said, letting go of the hair she had been holding onto in a fearful death grip.

"Nah, you wouldn't have. Mamai and Athair are very good at presenting a united front to outsiders." His eyes flicked over to them and the poor nurse that was frantically trying to get them to stop making a scene. "Well, were. I guess Bro falling back into his old ways and getting hurt this bad made a crack in that facade."

Despite herself, Ayaka was intrigued. "Old ways?"

"Aye. Athair got word from the senior NCO grapevine. Bro was trying to save people from a hit building and didn't realise he had already got hurt, and then he got caught in a second blast."

Ayaka shuddered. "How do you not know you're hurt?!"

{Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso Original soundtrack - Again}

"Being a big, stupid _amadan_ like Bro." He chuckled, taking the sting out of his words. "I guess you might not have liked him if you had met him, what, 6 or more years ago? He used to be such a hothead."

Ayaka looked dubious. "Are you sure you should be telling me this?"

Ciarán laughed. "Why not? Since Big Sis and Second Sis haven't been around and aren't due yet, so it's up to the annoying younger brother to embarrass him. He would have had to tell you sooner or later, right?" His expression grew somber and he lowered his voice. "He always chafed under Athair's yoke. Athair thought art and architecture was for wimps and didn't approve of his ambitions. Bro also had a helping people thing and didn't fear getting into scraps or butting in on wrongs he thought needed righting. I don't know about Athair, how much he cared, but I know Mamai, our sisters and I always feared he would get in over his head, piss off the wrong people and get shanked or shot or something."

In the midst of contemplating this new information, something about what Ciarán had said struck her suddenly. "You… you said 'used to be'."

"Aye, I did. There was a period when he was 17 that he started acting weird."

"Weird? How so?"

"Oh, he suddenly got lost on the way to school. And then his part-time job."

Ayaka stared. "Huh?"

"That wasn't the half of it. He got real twitchy. Kept jumping at the most innocuous things. Got wobbly and clumsy like his skin didn't fit right. Forgot stuff he should have known. Also spent quite a bit on cake and pastries and stuff." He shook his head, but it was one of amused, fond remembrance. "Never thought he cared what his food looked like, but his Instagram took an odd turn that time. Guess he secretly had a sweet tooth. And sometimes he would blurt out Japanese when under pressure."

"I was very surprised when I discovered that."

Ciarán blinked, astonished. "Oh, you actually do know too." He paused for a bit, looking up at the ceiling in thought, then said, "Pardon me asking, but did he ever tell you or you ever ask him about his relationship history?"

Ayaka furrowed her brows in thought. "I think… I'm his first? He said he had a crush on someone at his waiter job once, but screwed up the first date."

"Hah! Yeah, so much for being single out of choice. Guess I got all the luck with the ladies. He had a crush on, eh, what's her name, Oku-something."

Makiko Okudera, Ayaka's mind pulled from somewhere. And the proper honourific was _senpai_ , not _san._

"It's been 6 years and I'm fuzzy," Ciarán continued. "He didn't really talk about the restaurant."

"The restaurant... He's brought me to Il Giardino Delle Parole a couple of times, but most of his fellow part-timers have already moved on too."

"Oh well. But-wait, where was I going with that?"

"It was… Uiui suddenly breaking into Japanese?"

"Oh yeah!" If the pet name had given him pause, Ciarán did not show any of it. "He would sometimes start speaking Japanese. Not even single words like Bro or I might occasionally slip into with Gaeilge, but whole sentences. Even had the right-ish accent. I think. Never had many Japanese friends, so I can't tell. Yeah, I did say he was bull-headed, but I don't think he was that obsessed to actually pick up her mother tongue to impress her, never mind somehow sneak in the time to be that good with it."

"Mm." She was faintly aware she should have been feeling some jealousy at the thought of Uileag going to extremes for an old flame, but she was not. Instead…

Sadness.

An inexplicable melancholy ran through her at the thought, and it was not for herself. It was, oddly enough, for Uileag and… And Okudera- _senpai_.

Why?

She asked herself and could find no answer.

Unaware of her confused thoughts, Ciarán continued, "There were upsides, though. Well, upsides from Athair's view, at least. He got a lot more meek, more obedient. Servile, even. Always nodding in assent, almost… well, outright bowing at times, and sincerely at that. I think Athair was overjoyed, but the rest of us found it a bit scary."

Ayaka nodded a few times rapidly. She could imagine her family would have been disturbed if she suddenly started kicking over tables.

"Curiously, he also became interested in astronomy and rural life at the same time."

Ayaka tilted her head in thought. "I...can't see the connection between the two."

"Me neither. None of us could. Our ancestors came straight to New York, never resided in the country." Ciarán paused, then added, "Well, it turned out to be a phase or something, because after a few months of snapping back and forth between usual and weird, he was mostly back to normal."

"Mostly?"

"Eh, most of his rough edges got filed away. He was less impulsive afterwards. More considerate, more contemplative. It was, I guess you could say, a happy medium between the old him and the odd him. Except for the distractibility, maybe."

"What do you mean?"

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - First View of Tokyo}

 _Uileag was staring again._

" _Bro, hurry up!" Ciarán called._

 _Almost every time he left the house, he would stare into the distance. Staring at the city._

" _Ui!"_

 _Not a quick glance of checking the way was clear or casually admiring the view, but a long sweeping, scanning gaze._

" _Oi, Uileag!"_

 _Almost as if he was unsure where he was._

 _Uileag jumped. "Ah! Sorry."_

 _Or surprised to be here._

" _Took you long enough."_

"And not just that," Ciarán continued. "Sometimes I would catch him looking at his own hands or staring at his reflection. Not in the way of someone admiring his own good looks, mind; I've known enough narcissists to tell what that looks like. No, it was like he was expecting to see something there."

"I must not be particularly observant, because I haven't seen him do that when we're out together," Ayaka said in a small voice.

"Oh, no, it tapered off after… huh." Ciarán straightened up abruptly, as if having come to a sudden epiphany. "How did I not notice before?"

"Sorry?"

"He stopped this absent-mindedness after-roughly after he first met you." He leaned over, scrutinising. "Maybe you were the one he was looking for all along."

Ayaka stared back, bewildered. "What are you say-no, that can't be. No. It's probably just a coincidence."

He slouched back against the seat. "I'm just saying, Sis, the timing fits very well. But okay, I won't press the issue."

Ayaka frowned and tried to push him towards a different topic. "What do you think caused all this, anyway?"

"I haven't the foggiest…" Ciarán's mouth opened, but closed without saying anything else. "No, that's silly," Ayaka thought she heard him mutter.

"Were you about to say something?"

He rubbed his chin in thought. "I'm not sure why I feel this way, but something makes me think he met someone then, and he or she had a great impact on him. When or how exactly, though, I can't begin to fathom." He then squinted at her.

"Sorry?"

"The way you frowned just now, it looked like how Bro would have. I guess there's really some truth in the saying that couples in love grow to resemble each other."

Ayaka raised a hand to her face to hide her burning cheeks.

Ciarán laughed.

"You seem to be taking all this quite well, though," Ayaka noted somberly. "I don't feel in the slightest like laughing."

He gestured at Uileag's comatose form. "It's not like our fretting can help Bro right now. The surgeons did what they could and now it's in God's hands. I learned quite young to go with the flow and not worry about things. Something Bro never grasped, for better or worse. I mean, he didn't have to insist on getting his degree first before joining the navy. Not that there's anything wrong with that, not from my point of view."

"But?"

"Eh… I just wonder sometimes how he would be like if he was more chill, more given to drifting instead of fighting the current."

"This whole thing might look rather different," Ayaka said. "I can't begin to predict in any more detail than that, though." Her hand found its way back to playing with her sidelock as she resumed her desperate lookout for any sign of recovery on Uileag's part, Ciarán's talk about not worrying having failed to go into her head. "It might look very, very different indeed," she added in a whisper to no one in particular.

* * *

Authors' Notes:

That stretched out a lot longer than we were expected. We were originally planning on jumping straight to Ayaka reawakening her old self. Then we thought to have this as a connector between the previous chapter and the next, but only as a short paragraph or two at the start of the next, or maybe as a flashback somewhere in the middle of that. It kinda got out of hand…

Wonder if we left enough dramatic irony lying around to overjoy Magneto?

Max_and_emilytate (MAEt) and I spent some time wondering if Mitsuha, and thus Ayaka, would have any adverse reactions to hospitals, given that the topic never came up in KnNW's present day. We're running with the assumption that she would have, as suggested in the chapter; you're free to disagree, of course. We just ask that you keep your response civil.

Regarding the weeks/months thing of the body swaps, we saw a timeline someone compiled of canon. Everything happened in only a month or so. We always thought that was a bit short. Well, even if you want to keep the Itomori/Imamura Disaster on October 4th, 2013, we figure you can still make the date of the first swap earlier, give 'em more time to grow into each other's skin. It's not like anything critical happens earlier in the year that extending the length of the body-swapping period would disrupt. When the cosmos thinks in 1,200-year timeframes, an extra month or two isn't enough to be statistically significant.

That last bit is kind of a meta joke. When MAEt first worked with Iandimas to come up with Uileag's original concept, long before we knew what KnNW was, he didn't really have much to him. Just some petty officer in the right place and time to get husbando'd by Pacific canon-compliant, summoned (well, self-manifesting, technically) PacIowa. Dutiful, obedient, carefree and not very imaginative chap, enlisting straight after high school, the kind of first son Senior Chief Greer would rather have had. Not that we had properly conceptualised the rest of the Greer family back then. Using that Uileag here would have looked rather different.

Talking about Uileag's original design. Canonically, we don't know much about Taki's father other than that he exists, unless there's some revelation hiding in _Another Side: Earthbound_ or some other supplemental material we haven't gotten to yet. His mother is worse; she doesn't get a mention at all, apart from a vague note in the novelisation that Taki had to get used to living with only his father. So, we just went ahead and slapped in what we had of the Greer family and started working from there.

Also, recently learned that there's a voice actress named Ayaka Imamura who voices I-13 and I-14 in KanColle. We swear we didn't know that. As datestamped at MAEt Rambles, not!Mitsuha was named Ayaka all the way back in December 2016. As also datestamped there, we chose Imamura as the name of not!Itomori out of an association chain: Lake Itomori is based on Lake Suwa, which is in the Kiso Mountains, which brings us to the river and namesake CL, whose last captain was surnamed Imamura. Also back in December 2016.


	4. Chapter 3

Authors' Notes: So here we finally get to the onscreen botes… and the first of the two main heresies this fic perpetrates against the usual KanColle interpretations. If you want to try guessing, here's a hint: The abyssal supreme commander's theme, as first shown in the prologue. The source thereof, to be specific.

Also, you get the main reason why part of the setting was changed to New York City rather than Tokyo.

===[===]===

CHAPTER THREE

===[===]===

1 month later

===[===]===

"Uileag Shane Greer!" Ayaka shouted as she stormed into the hospital room.

The man in question turned from his family to her, a deer in the headlights look on his face. "Er, hi, Ayachi."

"Don't 'Hi Ayachi' me you reckless idiot!"

Ciarán artfully concealed a chuckle in a cough.

Ayaka stretched her arms out to shake him, then thought better of potentially aggravating his condition and settled for rattling the safety rail to his bed instead. "What were you thinking?!"

The first week had passed futilely. Yoshimichi had shown up as promised to offer his support, but there had been no sign of stirring in Uileag's form, and Ayaka had had to return to New York with a heavy heart. On the day they were going to fly back, Ayaka had paused at the door on the way out of the hospital room, her gaze silently lingering on him.

{Are you scared he'll…} Yoshimichi paused. {That he'll die while you're away, like-}

" _Ms Nijimi wanted me to tell you this before she passed on, Sir," the nurse on the line said. "'This is not farewell.'"_

{Like Mom?} Ayaka whispered.

Yoshimichi hung his head. {Yes.}

The Greers had promised to contact her as soon as there was any change in his condition, for better or worse. A second passed; she called them every day to no avail. A third, during which he had become stable enough to be downgraded out of intensive care, but showed no other sign of regaining consciousness. It was only during the fourth that she had been called to inform her that Uileag had finally returned to the land of the waking, and she had caught the first flight out as soon as she could clear it with her boss and get one.

"I-I couldn't leave anyone to die," Uileag said.

"But at the cost of your own life?!" Ayaka asked. "What profit you if you save the whole world and lose your soul?!"

Uileag averted his eyes, unable to come up with an answer he thought was satisfactory.

Ayaka sagged like a deflating balloon. Fire gone from her eyes and voice, she said, "Please don't do that to your family again." Her gaze fell away from his face. "To me," she added, much more softly.

Uileag shifted uncomfortably in the bed. "I'll...try not to."

"Hmph. Apology accepted."

Uileag blinked. "What-oh. Oh."

Ayaka turned back to him. "You're still an idiot, though."

Uileag laughed. "I love you too, Ayachi."

As she laughed back, Ciarán looked at the rest of the Greers and whispered, "Let's give the lovebirds some space."

"But-"

"Not a word," Mrs Greer hushed Mr Greer. "Ayaka and Uileag are good kids. They're not going to do anything naughty while our backs are turned."

They tiptoed out of the room, Ciarán's grinning sisters pushing a reluctant Mr Greer, and shut the door quietly behind them.

===[===]===

April 19 2023

===[===]===

Was it already 4 months?

Ayaka was sometimes still amazed by how quickly people had gotten used to the new normal. Thousands had had their lives forever changed by one night of terror and the running battles in the following days, loved ones either lost to them or wounded so physically or psychologically they might as well have been, but life had gone on for almost everyone else in the US.

Distantly, she knew that there were parts of the world that were still daily under threat if not outright depopulated, their people slain or turned into refugees - places like Singapore, Malta, Indonesia, too many islands in the Caribbean and Pacific among others - by the seaborne scourge responsible for the New Date of Infamy. Even larger, better-defended island nations like Japan or the United Kingdom lived in fear of getting their sea lanes cut off.

All this was far from her mind on this night, though. Far from most Americans', frankly. For nations with vast inland hinterlands like theirs, China or Russia, the threat of being starved out by sea was nowhere as dire. Sure, there were artillery pieces along the coastline, particularly near Fort Hamilton, and anti-aircraft weapons every few blocks, for what they were worth, but most people had quickly learned to shrug and carry on. It probably helped that the End of Terror had been recent enough that people still remembered how the bad old days preceding it had been, and thus developed some desensitisation. Furthermore, the nebulous aquatic nature of the threat, combined with the navy's great losses, meant that a draft was of little use at best without a terrestrial territory-holding foe to be thrown at, so only the most diehard advocates had even tried pushing one through. Similarly, the lack of a clear target to direct righteous anger at, unlike First Pearl, meant the lines at recruitment offices were not so long as they might have been otherwise.

Right now, she was on her way back from work. Idly, she noted that though Uileag had regained consciousness at the end of the first month, it had taken two months before the doctors had deemed his condition good enough to be discharged, that his organs would not spontaneously fail on him, complete with rehabilitation and physiotherapy to ensure he had not forgotten how to walk. Now he was on convalescent leave back home in New York.

The evening sky, shifting from dusk to twilight, was getting overcast and she reflexively checked her bag for her umbrella, despite knowing full well that the gesture would not have made a difference if it were not actually there.

Ayaka slowed her pace and turned her head. This was not, strictly speaking, the most direct path home from work, but a slight detour that included a stretch of walking taking her past the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It always seemed to call out to her, ask her to linger a bit longer.

Frankly, she had no idea why. The lush countryside of lost Imamura had been far from any industrial zone, and for all her close friendship with Morrie, she had never cared for the machinery Morikawa Construction used in their construction trade. Neither had she been much fan of ships; nestled well inland, for her youth, the sea had been a nigh-mythical place. The banks of Lake Imamura were a whole different kettle of fish from the beaches facing the Atlantic, the latter being only visited on the rare occasions where time and money had permitted, and even those had dried up after-

After-

After Mom's death and everything falling apart.

Ayaka forced herself to complete the thought as she had been taught by the counselling, rather than running from it.

Yet there was something about this shipyard that kept drawing her eye. Ayaka racked her brain, trying to recall what she knew about it. Not much, admittedly. Also known as the United States Navy Yard and New York Naval Shipyard, it had been a major producer of ships during World War 2, but had eventually been closed and given over to non-nautical commercial use. With war afoot once more, it was being brought back into military service to help replenish the navy's numbers.

None of that explained why she was drawn to it.

Trying to put the thought out of her mind, she turned back to the path-

What was that noise?

A droning sound, like a propeller plane-

Confusion gave way to horrified realisation in time for her to hear high-pitched whistling, and she threw herself to the ground.

Thunderclaps to her side, bright flashes, and she achingly rolled onto her left to see the Brooklyn Navy Yard under attack.

Ayaka placed one hand on the ground and pushed herself back to her feet. Her hand took hold of her phone to start finding the nearest bomb shelter - and then she stumbled.

{Furi Original Soundtrack feat. Carpenter Brut - Time to Wake Up}

YouTube watch?v=DyyhWQ1t2QM

Wake up.

"What?" Ayaka looked around, confused. "Who said that?"

Wake up.

Wake up.

Rise and shine, Ms Wallace. Rise and shine.

Oh, but you have not answered to that name in 33 years, have you? No, you go by a different name nowadays, after trading steel for flesh and oil for blood.

Not that I wish to imply that you have been sleeping on the job, or worse, are guilty of dereliction of duty, though some might take issue with your present model. No one is more deserving of rest, not after that wound that marked the end of your career, a similar one which killed a peer, and not when the decision to put you out to pasture, on the other end of a continent, was never in your own hands.

Let's just say your hour come round at last. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Which might you be?

The right woman in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.

So, wake up, Ms Wallace.

Wake up and smell the ashes.

Then there was heat.

A warmth, deep in her chest but spreading quickly to suffuse her entire being, and it was suddenly clear what she had to do next. She skipped the search for a shelter and went straight to messaging both Uileag and her family that she was on the way to one and they need not worry, she would be fine and contact them as soon as it was safe.

Then she turned the other way, even as air raid sirens finally began wailing, and ran straight for the shipyard. Her mind filled with knowledge of how to get in, go through and around any possible obstacles, and she ran.

Water. She needed to reach the water.

Long legs ate up the distance. Her height had always been a boon when running, but this-this was on a whole different level. Almost like flying.

The shipyard was chaos and fire and shouting, but if anyone noticed the giant beanstalk blazing past at speeds to give Usain Bolt a run for his money, no sign of it came her way. Or maybe any observers were too confused by the sight and dismissed it as a hallucination.

There was no hesitation, only a clear path in her mind guiding her through the mess of a shipyard in the midst of being converted back to military production, and she followed it unerringly, without breaking stride for anything.

Down the nearest pier.

Leap.

Soar through the air with the ease of a long-jumper.

Land easily on the water, with minimal muss.

Turn to face the Upper Bay even while sliding.

And then-

Light.

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - Kuchikamizake Trip}

Spotify track/5cxHHNR1GoptDrljqMX5EO

Her world burst into a painted, vaguely pastel aesthetic, and something compelled her to look up.

"It's full of stars…"

And so it was. Yet that failed to do the vista justice. There had been plenty of beautiful starry skies out in the countryside, but this… this was beyond dazzling. More than just what photos showed the aurora borealis to look like, this was something that went beyond the simply, mundanely material into something positively supernal. One star twinkled.

There was a gentle tugging sensation on her hair, and she turned as an ethereal blue thread extended from one end of the braided cord she was wearing. It shot off into the distant west, disappearing past the horizon, until it made contact with something.

Old, a relic of a bygone era, and yet young by the standards of its peers. No, her. Her peers. Large, mighty, yet deceptively fleet-footed. Superficially content in slumber, but somehow a most melancholy on closer inspection, like she had gone through life with part of her purpose unfulfilled, relegated to playing second fiddle. Haunted by an old wound that had been hastily patched over, never properly healed.

She felt familiar, like an old friend once forgotten.

No, closer than that.

Family?

No, closer still. A part of herself, lost, detached, discarded not all willingly even, now reunited.

A bolt of something crashed into her from above, and she jerked and convulsed. She had experienced electrostatic shock before, but this was not just a short tingle, a momentary discomfort. It was a sustained rapid that surged throughout her whole self, singing and thrumming through her blood vessels, yet unlike what she thought electrocution would be, it did not hurt more than a bit. The warmth became a deep, consuming heat across her whole body, but a good kind of fire, like that of a salve soothing an overtaxed muscle.

Power.

Hers.

{Iron Man Original Soundtrack - Driving with the Top Down}

YouTube watch?v=I9PhfUsFvj0

Metal formed seemingly out of thin air and clamped itself onto her back and waist over her clothes, firmly and snugly, and began to unfold, spawning more and more material from who knows where. A piece shot backwards a short distance and began to unfold while rising, details taking shape, until it became recognisable as a ship's stack. From the sides of the centrepiece grew four arms. The lower two curved forward to nearly encircle her, forming two halves of a ship's bow, grey at the top and red at the bottom. Two anchors, cute in their toylike size, were mounted near the tips. Less cute were the turrets, one on each arm, the size of her torso and sporting three barrels, with smaller cannon on top. Anti-aircraft cannon rose from the decks. The end of the top right arm transformed into a third three-gun turret, and the last sprouted a ship's stern with two catapults for floatplanes and more smaller cannon. Despite its seeming bulk, it did not feel one bit like a burden. Nay, it belonged like a regained limb.

As the rigging finished taking shape, she became aware of Lilliputian beings moving within it, "fairies" rushing to take their intended positions, running through last-minute checks.

ESTABLISHING BATTLEFIELD CONTROL

The fire she had been feeling sparked and burst in her chest, roared to life as enginemen fairies got all eight boilers hot and the stack on her rigging began puffing away merrily. In one sense, it was the first time ever; yet in another, it was the first in over three decades.

BOILERS ONLINE

She flicked her right arm out and a white handle appeared in her empty hand, unfolding rapidly into a blue umbrella, one she pushed open and held up. Her vision expanded in a rush, letting her "see" far beyond what she had previously been capable of, giving range and bearing on the bombers that were banking to turn away after dropping their payloads. Despite their toylike dimensions, she could see them as surely as if they were full-sized. Not so, apparently, for the surface-to-air missiles that clawed for them but exploded short or long, if even anywhere remotely near at all.

SENSORS ONLINE

Speaking of hostiles...

Turrets spun on their mounts, barrels moving up and down with the effortless ease of wiggling toes. Fairies loaded shells and powder, primed all guns big and small to fire.

WEAPONS ONLINE

Diagnostics were ran through and came back all green.

ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL

SUPERNAL UPLINK SUCCESSFUL

WELCOME BACK

She turned to look at the burning Brooklyn Naval Yard and lowered her eyes even as something gave way yawningly and collapsed with a loud crash. "I'm sorry I'm late, but I'm home at last," she said mournfully, free hand raised to her chest. Despite the years and changes, it was still her cradle, and it saddened her to see it ruined so.

Turning back to the way ahead, the East River leading to the Upper New York Bay, she wiggled her cannons again. "Good to see you well again, Number Two," she said, stroking the turret in question like a long-lost pet. "1940s configuration again… A pity. I wish I had had the chance to play with the Harpoons and Tomahawks back then," she continued, a touch wistfully. "Hm?" Something at the back of her mind caught her attention and she pulled it to the fore. "I don't remember that being like this before." Confused, she put it aside for the moment and went back to what she knew. "All ahead full. Take us to flank speed."

"All ahead full, aye," the engineering officer fairy of the watch echoed, and she smoothly accelerated to 32 knots.

Simultaneously, a toy-sized OS2U Kingfisher shot forward on its catapult and hurtled into the air, turning to fly ahead of her.

It did not take long before a string of Morse code came back. "Renner. Sight one ship… Destroyer, I-class, DB003552. Sierra Echo Tango, over."

She hardly had time to focus on bringing what it saw up before she cleared the Brooklyn Bridge and got her first look at an abyssal in the flesh, serving picket duty in the Upper Bay on one side of Governors Island.

Call them "abyssals", "deep sea fleet", " _shinkaisei-kan_ " or whatever you like, these monsters had turned the night of 7th December 2022 into a charnel house. What she was looking at certainly was an abomination. It vaguely resembled a cetacea if H. R. Giger had had his way with it. Sleek black armour instead of or fully covering skin, two green lights for eyes, oversized, vaguely human teeth not covered by lips. No visible engine or stacks.

Her radio caught some kind of spine-chilling demonic, distorted screech. A distress signal, or a war cry? Such curiosity was quickly shunted to the back of her mind as the monster opened its mouth and began lobbing shells from a recessed cannon, simultaneously releasing torpedoes from hastily-unshadowed launchers, even as it turned swiftly and started opening the distance. Fleeing, presumably, for the rest of its battle group.

Therein lay the problem with combating abyssals using conventional methods. Mankind had learned at great cost on the New Date of Infamy and the subsequent running battles that the creatures had the durability and speed of warships, yet the sensor signature and agility of the smaller forms they boasted. Normal antiship weapons had difficulty getting a lock, never mind landing hits on them - beyond visual range missiles were pretty much a write off. Even this type, big enough to swallow a child, was still smaller than the destroyers it supposedly imitated and much more dextrous, judging from how it turned nearly 180 degrees while letting its inertia carry it back, and kept firing all the while.

Speaking of firing, bad enough that even the modest 5 inch rounds this thing fired tore through nigh-unarmoured modern ships it caught like a fist through wet tissue. Worse that the cadence of the creature's cannon was like the beat of an enthusiastic drummer, and it was putting fish in the water not much slower.

Which made it a good thing she could play that game too, did it not?

It was easy as moving a muscle to designate the target and get her own secondary cannons roaring back even as she altered her course to the right, shells and torpedoes whizzing past. The waves scattered from the blast front as her counter-fire tore through the air.

Some distant part of her insisted her eardrums should have been ruptured by all this.

Run, run.

The I-class threw itself into a zigzag course in an attempt to throw off her aim.

Not good enough.

Radar-guided shells sliced through its hide and went off. Torn apart, its carcass was quickly claimed by the water.

Now, where was the-

"Renner. Sight five ships. Battleship, Ru-class, one. Standard carrier, Wo-class, one. Destroyer, I-class, three. DB019081. Sierra Echo Tango, over."

Now she had time to call up the feed from the scout, and a corner of her field of view filled with the sight. Now familiar were the three whale-things. Not so the other two, more humanlike figures. The Japan Self-Defence Force had been the first to get a grip on the situation, and had quickly designated known abyssal types according to the conventional ship types they most closely resembled in capability and function according to the _iroha_ sequence. Although some resistance had been faced, the rest of the world had quickly fell in line, and public information announcements had quickly disseminated their appearances.

The Ru was a black-haired, aqua-eyed, bone-pale "woman" in a short-sleeved grey blouse, black vest and slacks with shoulder-mounted cannons and two shield-things with multiple cannons installed.

The Wo was silver-haired, with black pants, gloves and high heels over a white bodysuit that had a collar like a lower jaw, complete with teeth. She held a black cane with a crook, but most prominent was the xenomorph/jellyfish thing with tentacles and small cannon that she wore on her head.

Five ships, two of them capitals. That could be a problem. Plus that bearing meant there were plenty of buildings in the way, so she had no clear line of sight for her radar.

Nothing for it but to make the best of her spotter. The main cannons spun to face the designated spot and began pounding out a beat, more sedate than the secondaries but still faster than what she had been able to do last time.

"Renner, adjust fire..."

"Renner, adjust fire…"

"Renner, adjust fire…"

Despite herself, she was feeling the stirrings of frustration. Was she really that pathetic without radar?

She nearly missed when another sequence of Morse suddenly hit again, even as the scout's view swerved violently. "Renner, unable to maintain contact."

Translation: the scout had been made and she could expect trouble.

Great. Now she was effectively blind.

Not long after, the drone of propellers alerted her to incoming planes once more. The view from the scout dipped and shook left and right as it dived hard for the water, desperately trading height for speed even as it twisted this way and that to throw off the aim of the two enemy aircraft in hot pursuit, but the streams of bullets were coming ever closer.

Fortunately, so was she.

As soon as they got within range of her secondaries, the said guns started firing again. A bit nearer and the anti-aircraft cannon joined in, turning the air inhospitable, and the enemy planes turned into confetti.

The Kingfisher was wobbling from nonfatal hits, and she scooped it up in a hand and put it back in place, where crew fairies hurried to fuss over it. Now at rest, the view from it winked out.

Insistent warning tones rang, and she quickly changed course even as she tried to spot what was-

Shells whistled through the air, the water displacing loudly in great spouts where they missed, not nearly far enough for her liking.

The enemy planes must have gotten off a message before she had managed to destroy them, and the battleship must have received it.

Correction, first wave of enemy planes. There was a second wave inbound, much thicker this time, and one that had bombers.

At least the battleship's fire was giving her guns something to work with in trying to do counter-battery work. The buildings were still obstructing her radar, and sending her scouts back out now was sending sheep to the slaughter.

This was still secondhand information, though, trying to figure out where the Ru was by calculating the paths of its fire and guesstimating where it would be when her own shells arrived rather than blindly aiming at where it was and would no longer be. The continued rain of 16 inch shells meant her message obviously was not getting across.

The guns on the leading fighters buzzed as they bore down on her, kicking up the water where their shots missed. Behind them, dive bombers swooped like birds of prey, shrieking in from high and dropping their deadly payloads, while torpedo bombers hugged the waves to release torpedoes. Even as she turned towards them so they would overshoot, the battleship shells kept coming. From their paths, it seemed to be closing the range. Those blasted scouts - well, she had difficulty telling one abyssal plane type from another, but from the way it was doing pylon turns safely out of reach of her 5-inchers, it had to be a scout - were too far for anything other than her 16-inchers to touch, and those were not agile enough to hit. She was just not splashing bandits fast enough. Things were, to put lightly, getting hairy.

Then the shells coming over the horizon seemed to spontaneously multiply out of control, even as she finally gained line of sight on the abyssals, and she was taken aback. What witchcraft was this? Had she just entered 5-inch range or was there something else going on? She might have had nine Mark 12s, but the battleship and destroyers combined had around thrice that throw weight, and while 5-inch shells could not directly penetrate her belt, she had no interest in taking any to less-armoured areas. Never mind the fact that the sudden increase in rate of fire might not be just due to entering 5-inch range. Not like the utter saturation of the air was giving her much say in the matter, and she grit her teeth, bracing in preparation for taking hits.

The inexplicable oddity from before pulsed, drawing her attention once more, and with little to lose she turned her consciousness inward, trusting in the fairies even as she clawed for it, desperate for options.

She got them.

A fresh wave of bombers approached, spitting bombs, bullets and torpedoes, while the ships kept laying out shells like Izanami's own firehose - wait what - and even if they had not steadily been drawing the noose tight, sheer weight of fire might have led to something connecting.

Then she Stepped.

Abyssal aircraft wobbled from left to right, trying to figure out where she had gone. They got their answer when a barrage of 5in shells and smaller rounds swept them from the sky. The Ru snapped its head around to the left, finding its would-be prey hundreds of metres from the killbox that had been painstakingly set up. Confused by what had just happened, the next front of steel rain was nowhere as thick.

As said set of shells fell from the sky, she momentarily caught sight of two big ones following a number of smaller ones, the smaller ones throwing up water where they missed, even as the dark clouds temporarily parted to let some light from the setting sun in, and for a moment—

===[===]===

Next time on _Kimi no Na Iowa:_

===[===]===

Wait.

That never happened. Not like that.

Wait.

 _What_ never happened?

===[===]===

Ayaka stared, uncomprehending, ahead of herself.

===[===]===

"Explain this B, young man."

===[===]===

Gone like a letter swept away by the wind.

===[===]===

"Today's a big day."

===[===]===

People forgot. So easily did people forget.

===[===]===

"Look to the sky. Therein lies your answer."

===[===]===

Ayaka started, even as she noticed her surroundings distort and flicker.

===[===]===

"I am here."

===[===]===

Authors' Notes:

Credit to NGTM-1R for helping with the scout plane contact report protocol.

So, the answer to the question at the start:

More dakka and teleportation inspired by _Furi_.

In case it wasn't obvious, the aforementioned main reason for moving things to NYC instead of Tokyo is because Iowa was laid down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The original plan did not have the 1 month after segment, but after Chapter 2 became a thing, it seemed a natural progression.


	5. Chapter 4

Authors' Notes: And now, the second main heresy against the usual KanColle interpretations. Your hint: The seemingly non-sequitur reference to "skeins of fate", also from the prologue.

Also, some heresies against the _Kimi no Na Wa./your name._ side of things too.

If you somehow haven't been spoiled on _Kimi no Na Wa./your name._ yet, this is our final entreaty to go watch it in its entirety before proceeding any further. This chapter contains all the spoilers and we take no responsibility for anyone getting spoiled.

If you get a chance, you should get a copy of _Another Side: Earthbound_ too. Toshiki's section really expands a lot on Toshiki and Futaba, and Taki's section also contributed. Some of the stuff regarding them that seems different from the film was pulled from there.

===[===]===

CHAPTER FOUR

===[===]===

Ayaka blinked, awareness returning in a flash and a rush even as a voice in the back of her head confusedly said something about things not supposing to be like this. She was not standing on (on!) the waters of the Upper New York Bay at twilight looking at abyssal shells flying towards her any longer.

No, it was night and she was standing in a grass field.

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - Autumn Festival}

Spotify track/2gsBnGoOMF6rAuNwEmmmom

A grass field in Imamura.

Yes, it was Imamura. It had to be.

She was 17 again, clad in a dark blue yukata with floral patterns and tied with a red obi, her hair cut short to above her shoulders.

Across the starry sky streaked a pair of comets, one with a blue trail and the other glowing red.

Even as she watched, a shower of smaller meteorites collided with the ground far ahead, throwing up large plumes of dust. Some sixth sense drove her to look up, past a psychedelic riot of colours painting over the night, at a vast object approaching fast-

Wait.

That never happened. Not like that. She had never watched Fafnir's passage on a grass-

Wait.

 _What_ never happened?

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - Evoking Memories}

Spotify track/5CDWYaMhMvKAmQnaKrrCsL

The Imamura Disaster of October 4th, 2013. She could not remember clearly exactly what had transpired before the meteor fall, but she knew that the autumn festival had been interrupted by an unscheduled evacuation drill—

 _Ayaka grit her teeth against a fresh pulse of pain wracking her entire body and pressed on. {If I'm right and you don't do anything, on the other hand, the deaths of more than 500 people will be on. Your. Head.}_

No, wait. She had been the one to talk her father into ordering the evacuation. But how did—

 _Ayaka stared, disbelieving, at what was written on her right palm._

 _"I love you"_

 _Slowly, she started laughing bitterly even as tears flowed unbidden. "I… I can't remember you with this."_

Who? Who had she been trying to remember?

 _{That's really going to fall?} Morrie asked, looking at Fafnir._

 _{Yes! Saw it myself,} Ayaka said, jabbing herself for emphasis._

 _A confused look briefly passed over Morrie's face, but if he had any more doubts, he did not bother voicing them. {Then I guess I have no choice.} He grinned toothily. {Now we're both criminals!}_

Right. There had been an explosion that took out the substation shortly before the evacuation. Despite extensive, nerve-wracking investigations, no culprit had ever been found, and the police, both Fed and local, and alphabet soup agencies had cold-cased the matter. If it had happened before the End of Terror, things would never have been blown off like that.

That… had been her and Morrie's doing?

 _Ayaka stared, uncomprehending, ahead of herself, arm outstretched, fingers curled, like she was supposed to be holding something._

She felt like she was missing something-

 _"So we don't forget when we wake up, let's write our names on each other's hands," a younger Uileag, his black hoodie less threadbare than she remembered it being, told her, holding a black marker, holding a black marker._

 _Out of the corner of her eye, the view of Imamura from up here seemed to flicker between the intact town and a second lake._

Wait a moment-

 _"But how did you get here?"_

 _"I drank your_ kuchikamizake."

 _It took a while for Ayaka to process what Uileag had just said, but she flushed rapidly once it did. "You—you drank my… and you touched… Pervert!"_

 _"It was only once!"_

The Ayaka of… Present? Had, of course, kissed Uileag before, but the other her's embarrassment seemed to leak through, and the heat on her cheeks distracted her long enough for another sight to enter her mind's eye before she could come up with a thought.

 _"At that moment, did I… die?" Ayaka, fallen to her knees, stared at where Imamura was supposed to be, but now only had two overlapping lakes._

What-

 _"I'm Uileag again! But what was he doing in the shrine?"_

The mountain crater shrine, the so-called body of the god. She still did her best to make time and accompany Gran to it every year, but it was such a far-off, desolate place, even beyond already far-flung Imamura proper. How would Uileag have known about it?

Also, what did the her of her memories mean by "again"?

 _"Gran, could you do me a favour?"_

 _Snip went the scissors, and Ichiyo caught her long locks before they could fall._

Ayaka vaguely remembered having gotten a haircut around that time, but why-

 _"Up here, Uileag." She smiled, pointing at herself, as an even younger Uileag craned his neck to look up at her. "Don't you remember me?"_

 _All she got in return was a blank look, even after a second query, and her heart sank in shock, confusion and disappointment. "I'm sorry. I must have mistook you for someone else."_

 _Ayaka was so distraught she did not notice when the train jerked and caused her to accidentally give him a faceful of her breasts. The subsequent muttered "Weird girl" pierced her heart like an arrow._

 _As the train pulled into the station where she had to change to get back home, Uileag suddenly shouted, "Wait, you! What's your name?"_

 _Surprised, Ayaka whirled, and some instinct drove her to pull the braided cord securing her hair free before hurling it at him._

 _"Ayaka!"_

 _For a moment, it could be seen to not be uniformly blue, but had bands of green and red before meeting an elaborate black, vaguely dragon-shaped centre._

 _"My name is Ayaka!"_

 _He caught it._

Caught off guard by the sudden sympathetic heartache, Ayaka did not manage to formulate any thoughts before the next vision - or was it a memory? - hit.

 _"If I suddenly showed up, would I bother him? Surprise him? He might not like it._

 _"Or maybe he'll be glad to see me?"_

It was plainly clear that the old her had not been able to convince herself.

 _"I'm going to NYC."_

 _Kagami whirled, surprised. "What? Now? Why?"_

Before present-her could join her sister in confusion, the memory fuzzed and resolved into something further in the past.

 _"I wanted to go, but-" A tear flowed down her face, causing her thoughts to crash to a halt. "Why am I…?"_

Before she could begin to think of an answer, though, a sequence of memories crashed into her in reverse chronological order, taking her off-guard even as they answered questions.

 _Helping Uileag get a date with Okudera-_ sempai, _and getting irate messages in response._

 _"Don't be conceited. Not like you have a girlfriend."_

 _{Watch the skirt! This is basic,_ aho!} _Frustrated snarls aplenty in Japanese over some character-breaking antic or another of his, vaguely aware at the back of her head that the non-Senior Chief Greer members of his family were looking at him(?) oddly as she angrily mashed out entries into Uileag's phone._

 _Confusion over getting love letters from the other girls at school and being asked to do dance moves._

 _Being the most genuinely obedient, servile even, Mr Greer had ever seen his older son being, even as Ciarán, Mrs Greer and the Greer daughters cowered, bewildered and concerned, behind any available cover._

 _Working her - well, his, technically - butt off at a restaurant._

 _Expensive treats at cafés with Uileag's friends, even as the sheer delight of enjoying them warred with guilt over the splurging. Not that she would admit it to him._

 _Getting lost on the way to school._

 _Her first sight of New York City, with its magnificently gleaming skyline._

 _Screaming into the night after the ritual dance._

 _"I hate this town! I hate this life! Make me a handsome New York boy in my next life!"_

 _Helping Gran to make_ kumihimo _alongside Kagami._

 _Hitomi and Morrie's confusion over her odd behaviour the previous day, with the latter saying bizarre things about past lives._

 _Her father interrupting his political rally to publicly correct her posture in front of a sizable portion of the townsfolk, and all the humiliation that had entailed._

 _Kagami's non sequitur comments on her being normal and not carrying out hardware diagnostics._

And then, to her horror, the memories started digging further and deeper into her past, burrowing into territory that therapy had never truly helped her move past.

 _Watching Dad walking away from the household resignedly after tensions between him and Gran had reached breaking point, and her treacherous 11-year old self pushing him away when he tried to extend an offer to go with him. The point when he had stopped being Dad and, for 6 agonising years, became a far-off Father. Gran had tried very valiantly, but she couldn't compensate by herself for the void both missing parents had left._

 _The sheer, heartwrenching despair on his face in the days after Mom's death. The lethargy of a man who had lost too much and had not even been able to say goodbye one last time._

 _Mom's final journey, to a grave now forever shattered beyond any reasonable hope of finding by Fafnir._

 _{I'm so sorry, my dears,} she had weakly rasped out not too long before that._

 _Mom's sudden and inexorable deterioration, and her stubborn refusal to leave Imamura and get advanced care for it until things were too late._

Fortunately, past the layer of old hurt and pain was one of more pleasant distant everyday memories.

 _{You're a big sister now,} Mom said as 7-year old Ayaka hugged her swollen belly._

 _Mom trying to get her started on the practices of the Shirokaze Shrine, and that one childish disaster she had tried to hide._

 _Her struggling to read the papers and journal articles Dad was going through, while he patiently did his best to explain every big word._

So on and so forth, rewinding the clock on her life, back past even what she should not have been able to remember, and then her surroundings fuzzed and glitched.

Ayaka rubbed her eyes and they resolved into Mr and Mrs Greer, giant-sized and much younger.

What was go-

 _"Uileag Shane. That'll be his name," the giant, younger Mr Greer said with an air of finality._

She-was she?

No, no way.

 _Standing on a dock waving uncomprehendingly goodbye to an_ Athair _going off to sea._

Athair _who, like his before him, was a navy seadog who never grasped what being a father was supposed to look like, and fell back on treating the next bearer of the family legacy - a son, finally, after two daughters - like a recruit instead, to be hammered into shape by any means necessary._

 _"Explain this B, young man."_

 _Perhaps another universe's Uileag Shane Greer might have accepted his life for what it was, went along unquestioningly. This one, however, pushed back. When that failed to get him anywhere, he had chafed under the yoke, simmered and bubbled beneath the reluctant surface obedience with anger._

 _An anger he was all too willing to unleash._

 _"Give Peter back his lunch money, Flash."_

 _"Or what, Ew-"WHAM_

 _Fortunately in service of the right causes._

 _"Here you go."_

 _"Er, thanks."_

 _"No problem. No way I could have stood by and did nothing."_

 _"Bu-but isn't your scary dad going to ground you for this?"_

 _Mr Greer's ire had indeed been frigid that night, and it would not have been the last time it was roused._

 _With time, the savage beast found some soothing in myriad diverse avenues, some having greater impact than others. Basketball, Michael Jackson, art and architecture. Predictably, not all of this was to Mr Greer's liking._

 _"Architecture? Why don't you do proper engineering?"_

 _Onward the current of memories carried her down the river of Uileag's timeline, and then it resolved into him in a train at the age of 14, confronted by a very familiar giant beanstalk of a high school girl asking him if he remembered her._

 _Naturally, he hadn't the foggiest._

 _That glimpse had ended with him staring at the intricately-braided cord that she had thrown to him, and hesitantly tying it around his right wrist as it just felt right. Fortunately, when he reached home, no questions had been asked about it._

 _The next day, October 4th, 2013, Comet Fafnir was high in the sky, visible for all to see. Uileag had been but one of those out admiring its cosmic beauty._

 _It would not be till the next day that he would learn its splitting in two had destroyed the small, primarily Japanese American town of Imamura._

 _People forgot. So easily did people forget._

 _Thus, as days turned into weeks, months and years, had Uileag not thought anything more of a meteor-shattered town or the weird girl with the braided cord._

 _Then he woke up one day in the body of a girl and, as Ayaka "watched" with a sinking feeling of appalled realisation, carried out hardware diagnostics, thinking it a very realistic dream, and was interrupted by a confused Kagami. After that-_

 _"WHAAAAAT?!"_

Ayaka winced. Her screaming wasn't that shrill… was it?

 _It was only the grasp of Japanese Ayaka must have left behind that had prevented that first day from being a total, unmitigated disaster, and it was still by any objective standard a mess._

Ayaka had no time to start deciding whether she should laugh or be shocked by the sheer magnitude of the screwups she had just "remembered" before the memories pushed on.

 _"What?" Uileag stared disbelievingly at the diary entry Ayaka had left in his phone._

 _"Hey-hey, Bro, how're you doing today?" Ciarán asked over breakfast._

 _Uileag blinked and looked up from the food for a moment. "Fine, why?"_

It must not have consciously registered back then, but "replaying" the memories like this, Ayaka caught Mrs Greer and Ciarán exchanging concerned looks.

 _"Did you hack my phone, Kas?" Uileag snapped. On seeing his friends' quizzical looks, however, he quickly backspaced._

 _"You tried to steal a march on us!" One of Uileag's colleagues at the restaurant growled over Ayaka-in-him walking Okudera_ -sempai _home._

 _The kicking over of a table as it played out in response to her classmates' gossiping about her, and Uileag-in-her leaning in a most definitely nonthreatening manner some days later on two more girls who still didn't get the message._

Ayaka developed a twitching eyebrow as Uileag-in-her kept up the hardware diagnostics despite a now crystal clear insistence that it had only been the one time, which quickly became a losing battle against the urge to both facepalm and laugh at the contortions he hypocritically put himself through for the sake of the other modesty-related rules she had laid down.

{ _That_ oinseach!} _he snarled as his bank account balance steadily plummeted thanks to her gluttony._

 _Uileag getting caught dancing MJ's moves._

 _"I'm single because I want to be!"_

 _The trip to the god's shrine to offer their_ kuchikamizake, _complete with reminders about_ musubi.

 _{You're dreaming right now, aren't you?} Gran abruptly asked._

 _Suddenly segueing into the next day, the one with the date._

Once, she might have found Uileag's awkward missteps hilarious, or adorable at least. All it did now was leave her wincing, especially the lost, pained way he studied the photo exhibition on nostalgia, plagued by the feeling he was missing something. It did not escape Okudera- _sempai_ 's notice.

 _Uileag trying again to call her, to no avail. No matter how many times they had tried, it had always been for naught._

 _Days turning into weeks as he feverishly worked on a drawing of Imamura._

 _Searching for Imamura, with the unplanned inclusion of his doubting, distracted friends._

 _Joy at finally getting a lead on Imamura turning to ash in his mouth at the sight of its ruins._

Going back, year on year, on the anniversary of Fafnir's fall had never been for the faint of heart even if time had brought desensitisation and distance, but seeing it afresh through Uileag's eyes brought a new horror to it.

 _Uileag's frantic insistence that he had not been hallucinating her and hers falling flat as his phone erased itself of the entries Ayaka had left in it._

 _Digging through the local library for information on the disaster, horrified both by the disaster's toll and that it had faded from awareness despite being just 3 years past, until, flipping through an official listing of the dead, an unpleasant discovery was made._

Ayaka swallowed painfully along with Past Uileag.

 _"Morrie and Hitomi…"_

That, however, did nothing to prepare her for what Uileag had seen next.

 _Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai Ayaka Shirokaze - 17_

Seeing herself reduced to an entry in a list of the dead was something she had not been mentally prepared for, and she could not muster a useful response to the sight except to make choking sounds and stare in disbelief. Fortunately, the stream of memories moved on quickly before she could stew over it.

 _"Don't you remember me?"_

 _A voice in the dark, rousing Uileag from fitful slumber._

 _A vague note, telling his friends to head back to NYC without him, then sneaking out of the inn._

 _A ride under overcast skies, the former Imamura resident thanking him for the illustration._

 _A hike through rolling hills, sheltering in caves from the rain._

 _A sight of the god's shrine in the mountain crater, a proof that he had not after all conjured his experiences out of thin air._

 _A desperate prayer for one more time, one more chance to_

 _{Furi Original Soundtrack feat. Toxic Avenger - Make This Right}_

 _Youtube watch?v=1CGMk_roNaE_

 _A drink of her_ kuchikamizake, _and with context it no longer brought the burning embarrassment it had… would have had? Before._

 _And then-_

The "view" of the memories split in two.

 _On one side, Uileag awoke in her body, filled with tearful gratitude, even as a frightened Kagami slammed a door in his face and fled the house screaming about her sister gone off the deep end._

 _On the other, a glitching view of her lethargically begging off going to school._

 _Back in the first, Gran gave Uileag-in-her a history lesson._

 _{Treasure the experience. Dreams fade away after you wake up.}_

 _Making a plan with Morrie and Hitomi to evacuate Imamura._

 _{It's a perfect plan.}_

 _No, no it wasn't._

 _Said plan promptly derailing after crashing head on into then-Father's stubbornness._

 _{Sickness must be from the Shirokaze side.}_

Ayaka flinched. It had been abundantly clear from the family therapy after the Disaster that most of them practically had subscriptions, but hearing her father say that to "her" face sort of in person still came as a shock.

 _{Ayaka… No… Who-who are you?}_

 _A "call" from the god's shrine._

 _"Are you there?"_

 _Uileag filching Morrie's bike to get to the crater, and losing it along the way._

 _The faint, ethereal sound bells guiding him and her to their reunion._

 _"I came to see you. It wasn't easy because you were so far away."_

The now-remembered words brought an unconscious smile to Ayaka's face.

 _A black marker, writing a worthless message._

 _"I had wanted to tell you… That wherever you are in the world, I'll search for you._

 _"It's okay. I remember," Uileag said to himself after Ayaka had been dragged back to her own time._

No, Ayaka thought with horrified realisation. You won't.

 _Stooping, desperately patting for and taking up the marker, the frenzied scrawl of one racing impending doom._

 _Finish the A._

 _Y._

 _A vowel next, right? A, E, I-A?_

 _Pressing the nib to his hand to write the letter after that…_

 _Coming up blank._

 _"What-what's your name?!" he cried despairingly into the dark._

Meanwhile, the view of the timeline that originally had been had not remained idle.

 _{No, I just didn't feel like going, that's all.}_

 _Ayaka-who-once-was finished putting on a blue yukata with a red obi._

Ayaka's breath caught in her throat as it finally dawned on her where this was going.

Simultaneously, as the initial view with Uileag's memories continued to show him staring unblinkingly out into the dark, a third view sprung into existence, showing her in the altered timeline rushing back to Imamura, racing the comet she now knew would be her doom if she dawdled.

 _{Looks kinda funny, I guess?} Ayaka-who-once-was giggled, embarrassed, in response to Morrie and Hitomi's horror at her now-short hair._

 _Even as the events of the "true timeline" continued on, Ayaka-who-once-was walked to, and then through, the festivities while Morrie and Hitomi whispered about something behind her. Probably something to do with the haircut? The other her had not caught it clearly._

 _In one branch, a desperate race against time to get the townsfolk to evacuate faltering despite Hitomi on the hijacked broadcast system, forcing a mad dash to the seat of local government while trying to keep ahold of memories slipping away like water through a sieve._

 _In the other, a stroll in blissful ignorance._

 _In one, a painful fall and the discovery of a useless message._

 _In the other, walking to a large grass field in search of a better view._

 _In one, an impassioned plea that finally got the town emptying._

 _In the other, a sudden realisation that the comet was falling right on the very field she was in._

 _Impact._

One "view" winked out and was replaced by static.

Ayaka started shivering uncontrollably.

Had-

Had she-

Had she just watched herself die?

Distantly, she noted the contents of the other two views, both now fast-forwarding.

 _Uileag continued to stare out into the dark, until his exhaustion proved too much to bear, and sleep finally claimed him._

 _Her own memories showed the National Guard finally showing up at the high school turned evacuation point after a long, harrowing wait. Far too much time spent mentally replaying Imamura's devastation._

 _Far, far too much time._

Back on familiar ground at last, the replay of her memories winked out too, and both now-unused views blessedly vanished, Uileag's perspective reclaiming centre stage.

 _Waking up the next morning to an unfamiliar vista and a scrawled-on hand._

 _"What am I doing here?"_

 _Forward and onward, further down the river of memories._

 _A search for what was presumably a name, but without context there were too many results, and his interest had eventually waned._

 _Jumping for reasons he could hardly remember at every sight of a brunette with something blue in her hair._

 _Long, intense quarrels with his father over his future._

 _A deal struck, to get his degree before doing his eight with the navy._

 _Finishing high school._

 _University._

 _October 4th, 2021, 8 years after Fafnir. 5 years after that trip to find Imamura._

 _Okudera-_ sempai _had been near his campus town on work, and they had met up to reminisce._

 _So prompted, going through libraries for information on the Cometfall._

 _"Why does the scenery of a town that no longer exists wring my heart so?"_

 _Stopping in a coffee joint one rainy night while back in NYC for the winter break._

 _Behind him, Morrie and Hitomi discussing wedding preparations. An inexplicable sense of deja vu, though he placed their faces not._

 _Walking on an overhead bridge late another night, this one snowing, that December-_

Why did this look so familiar?

As if on cue, the view split in twain once more, showing her walking on a winter's night that had blended into the blur of so many similar, unremarkable others, except-

Wait.

No, no, no.

Was this-were-did they-

 _Just walk past each other without knowing._

Turn, you idiot! Turn! she screamed at herself.

Turn, she had, but too late.

 _Uileag had turned too, out of sync, but an open umbrella had obstructed sight of the braided cord in her hair, and exhausted after a long day out, he had failed to make much of what should have been extraordinary height._

 _From a distance, there had been nothing to make his back stand out, and she too had failed to recognise him._

 _A chance to reunite, if only a bit earlier, gone like a letter swept away by the wind._

 _Time continued to drift by._

 _End-April 2022._

 _With everything submitted, nothing left to freeze in an examination hall for, and his fourth, final year over, Uileag had returned home to wait out the days till commencement._

 _So it was that on April 28th, 2022, he had taken an early-morning journey around town, idly watching the view of spring outside the train, when another one had passed going the other way._

 _Two pairs of eyes met-_

 _"I had always been searching for someone!"_

 _-and a thrill of inexplicable recognition ran through the owners of both._

 _Getting off at the respective next stations, there had been a mad scramble through the winding streets, yet somehow he had known, and so had she, which turns to take._

 _On finally finding each other on opposing landings of a staircase, however, a sudden doubt had filled him even as his feet kept him moving forward, and Past Ayaka's too. Thus, they had passed each other wordlessly once more._

 _It might have all proven futile had he not made a leap of faith._

 _"Excuse me! Haven't we met?"_

 _Past Ayaka - clad, Present Her noted curiously, in the very same pink/white cardigan, yellow round neck blouse and pink three-quarter pants she was wearing right now - froze in her tracks. She turned back slowly, lips curling, unsteadily at first, then with more surety, into a smile even as she started tearing up._

 _"I thought so too!"_

And then, everything fell into place.

They had always wondered why, despite the short time they had known each other, they had got along so well, knew each other's quirks, and the reactions from each other's friends and family, like there was something oddly familiar, had borne it out. As though they had known each other before, somehow.

It was, rationally speaking, ridiculous.

Yet now that Ayaka finally knew what she knew, it made too much sense.

"Uileag, I remember!" She shouted into the air, heedless of the fact that he was nowhere near currently. "I remember now. Me, you, us. I remember e-very-thing-"

The magical moment passed, and she remembered where she was, what she, or rather her body, had been doing. With the surge from the regained memories came an awareness that broke through whatever mysterious power had taken her this far, causing Ayaka to stare in horrified realisation at the incoming shells. At a third death, one for real this time. She suddenly felt all too frail, mortal, and her body fell limp with a weary resignation, the at once familiar yet suddenly alien metal of the rigging forgotten.

"I remember everything at last, Uileag… just as I look death in the eye. I have finally remembered you, as I am about to be lost forever." She laughed bitterly, even as tears streaked down her face.

No, not yet. She wasn't ready to go yet, not when her mutual past with Uileag had just been tantalisingly dragged back out into the light.

No!

"No, not yet," someone abruptly echoed. "It's not time. We don't get to rest just yet, not that I believe you want to."

A strangely familiar voice.

"Who-"

{Furi Original Soundtrack feat. Waveshaper - A Picture in Motion}

Youtube watch?v=ZUlAytznxn4

There was something tugging at her depths. No, from deep within her. With a sudden exertion, a brief but inexplicably good pain, it burst forth.

Something stepped into view, walking on the water.

No, someone.

Herself.

No, not quite.

The face with its small mole, the body, the rigging attached, all were identical twins to Ayaka's own, and yet there were differences.

Her long hair hung free, nothing binding part of it in a braid.

She wore a blue sailor dress with a dark grey collar and puffy short sleeves. There was a white scarf with dark blue stripes and the sleeves bore patches with the navy "scrambled eggs". Another patch was present near the hem. "US NAVY" was written over a recessed left breast pocket. There were double white stripes at the edge of the collar, the hem and the sleeves. The dress had a white lace underlayer. There was a blue ribbon on her right wrist. White gartered thighhighs, threaded with blue ribbons, and blue sandals completed the outfit.

Most striking, though, were the eyes. They were the same dark shade of brown as her own and the face they were set in was just as young, equally devoid of wrinkles, yet they seemed so much older, like they had seen so much more.

"Who are you?" Ayaka asked. "Why do you-"

"Look like me? I think you know very well," the young woman said with a faint smile. "I am you and you are me."

"USS _Iowa_ , BB-61."

"That we are, yes." The text painted in white on their port bows said as much.

"Morrie was actually right with all that nonsense about past life memories?" Ayaka asked incredulously.

Iowa raised a hand to her face in thought. "Not in that particular context, he wasn't. That you did-do have them from me, yes, but it will take time for you to regain all of them. Well, what there is at any rate."

"So… I'm a shipgirl?" Ayaka hesitantly spun one of her main turrets on its mounting. Despite the growing rational improbability of everything that was happening, she still could control the rigging as effortlessly as though she had grown up with it.

" _Kanmusu,_ if you prefer, but yes."

Shipgirls. Women aged from elementary-schooler to adulthood, bearing machinery like ship parts and superpowers, answering to the names of warships from World War Two. They were the reason why the New Date of Infamy had not been even more of a slaughter, able to strike down the abyssals that eluded conventional methods so.

"But why now?" Ayaka asked.

Iowa's smile disappeared. "Today's a big day. Look the date up." Her gaze fell to the water. "There were 47, and then there were none. I don't even remember how it happened. Can't even offer that tiny bit of closure." She looked back up, meeting Ayaka's gaze once more. "It was the beginning of the end for me, and the start of the events that led to you." She gestured with her free hand, and Ayaka followed it to the distant smoke that presumably showed the rough bearing of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. "When my birthplace burned, the stars must have aligned."

"Why me, then? Why not just stay in the-" Ayaka paused to try to come up with the right term.

"The supernal realm? Afterlife? _Kakuriyo_ , I think you call it?"

"Yes! Why not stay there and wait to be summoned rather than-" Ayaka made a face, like she still had yet to accept what was going on, "reincarnate as me?"

Shipgirls fell into two main origins, or three depending on how one interpreted it. There were those that came straight back from their not so eternal rest in the supernal and could be split between the Manifested, who regained physical form by themselves, and the Summoned, who had to be called back by rituals and offerings. In practice there was little difference between the two, such that some made no distinction.

Then there were the Natural Born or Reincarnations. For some reason or another, some ship spirits had already returned to the material realm by taking up hosts in normal humans. Their true natures remained asleep, dormant, however, until some event prompted its Reawakening. It still remained unknown what criteria prompted Reawakening or how to detect a slumbering Natural Born.

Iowa shook her head. "It wasn't my call to make. I don't know either."

"Fat lot of good you are!" Ayaka snapped, the stress of all these events catching up to her.

"I know. I must apologise for all this."

Ayaka had not been expecting the sad, defeated whisper the reply came out in, or the haunted look in Other Her's eyes, and felt like she had kicked a puppy. "I-I'm sorry! I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you were stupid or incompetent or worthless or-"

"It's fine," Iowa remarked, holding out a hand in a stopping gesture before Ayaka could continue digging herself into a hole with inadvertent insults. "Really, it is." The smile returned, tinged with sorrow. "You're not wrong. My sisters and I were, ultimately, the product of developers trying to fight the previous war. By the time we were launched, never mind commissioned, the carrier had supplanted the battleship as the queen of the seas. We ended up as oversized flak dispensers and landscape redecorators rather than the frontline fighters our predecessors were, and our main guns…" she looked to one side and gently ran her fingers over Number Two like she was comforting a distressed child.

Ayaka was no shipgirl geek, but she had colleagues who latched onto to every bit of information they could get, and the existence of autonomous, animate turrets like that Shimakaze girl's meant she could well believe the turret actually could feel emotions.

"We never got to test them against the _Kongou_ s we were meant to counter. The last battleship on battleship engagement was at Surigao, and that…" Iowa frowned. "The history books call it a battle, but it was more of a slaughter. No offence intended to our brave fighting men, but Fusou and Yamashiro never had a chance. As for me, the only surface engagement of note was against Katori, and that was more like a mercy kill of a cripple way below my weight class." She looked back at Ayaka. "If you meet her, please offer my apologies. It was never personal."

"Katori?"

"Yes. So, I'm glad I got a chance to finally use my guns against another battleship, even if it was an abyssal Hellspawn rather than one made and crewed by men. Really, the only reason why we became so famed was because we were kept around for so long, brought back out of hibernation for Korea, Nam and Reagan's 600-ship Navy. If it hadn't been us, it could well have been SoDak, Indy, Mamie and Bamie who stuck around and got themselves lodged into pop culture. I think. As Friedman put it, we displace 10,000 tons more than them for only 6 knots more and slightly better guns with no increase in protection. Hardly a prize. Don't ask me to predict whether Congress would have bothered keeping the _South Dakota_ s around, though; a politician's mind is a confusing and terrible place to be."

Both of them burst out in laughter.

"Did you know there were supposed to have been six of us?" Iowa asked.

"Six? Ayaka tilted her head, confused at the sudden change in topic. "But there are only four of you… Us? Around today. Did the last two get sunk or scrapped after the war?"

"Would that they had," Iowa said. "No, Illinois and Kentucky were aborted." She looked away suddenly, but Ayaka could not miss how her shoulders trembled violently. "Put on hold for 2 years pending a proposed carrier conversion that never materialised, then left on the backburner. Illinois was cancelled just 2 days after Hiroshima, less than a quarter complete, then left to rust for 13 years before she was finally put out of her misery. Kentucky suffered on and off suspensions and was strung along by talk of being converted to an anti-aircraft specialist, then a guided missile battleship, before work was halted in 1950 and she was cut up for parts."

Ayaka shuddered. She had no idea her own voice could sound so bitter, venomous enough to kill an elephant.

No, wait, she could. It did whenever the topic of-

Ethereal bells rang softly, faintly.

Both of their heads snapped around, their eyes meeting. "Did you hear that too?"

Very familiar bells.

"Yes, I… you'd… best see this," Iowa said, disbelief in her face and voice, before stepping aside.

"What's going on-"

Between eyeblinks, someone had appeared as if from thin air.

Ayaka's jaw dropped.

She had not seen this face in more than 15 years, and yet knew it all too well, for it occupied pride of place on the Shirokaze family home's mantelpiece.

It was a face that she had begged to somehow see again for years after its owner had been torn from her, but now it was before her once more, she found herself wanting for words.

So Nijimi Shirokaze spoke first.

{Hello, little star.}

{Voices of a Distant Star Original Soundtrack feat. LOW - Through the Years and Far Away}

Youtube watch?v=uxyOeyjggPI

" _Kaasan_?"

{Look how you've grown, Ayaka,} Nijimi said in Japanese. Gone was the pale, haggard sick, dying woman; in its place was a 30-something in the pink of health. Mother and elder daughter had always looked alike, but the resemblance was now stronger than ever. She was wearing a white sun hat with a black ribbon and a pink jacket over a white dress. Stepping forward, she reached out to take Ayaka's cheeks in her hands.

Ayaka bent to let her do so, but did not trust herself to speak, not sure if she had finally broken and was now hallucinating.

{All the way until the day I died, I still never figured out how you managed to mummify your hedgehog plushie with the _kumihimo_ threads,} Nijimi said, chuckling.

That was all the proof Ayaka needed. Without further hesitation, she wrapped her mother in a bear hug and started bawling her eyes out, while Nijimi soothingly rubbed her back.

Eventually, Ayaka recovered enough to let go and say, {Mom, I-I've been begging and hoping and praying for this so long, but now that you're finally here, I-I don't know what to say!}

Nijimi's smile turned sad. {I'm afraid you won't have the time to think now, Ayaka. I can't stay long.}

Ayaka's heart sank, and she forced herself to take a deep breath in an attempt to steady herself. {But… but how are you here?}

{What time is it now, Ayaka?}

{The time?} Ayaka instinctively started reaching for her phone, but the setting sun caught her in mid-gesture, and she blinked in comprehension. {Oh. Twilight.}

{Yes, _katawaredoki._ When the boundaries between worlds grows thin…}

{And one might encounter something not quite human. Or learn that one was never fully human,} Ayaka finished, a sour look on her face.

{I'm sorry. I don't know what that's like, how it must be for you,} Nijimi said softly. {I didn't know. But whoever or whatever you were in your past life, you are still my daughter. Never forget that.}

Ayaka tried to smile. {Thanks, Mom.}

{That said, for all the alleged wisdom I supposedly had, I wonder if your father knew something I didn't when naming you.}

Ayaka raised an eyebrow, confused.

{We spent some time trying to come up with names for you. We had mostly narrowed it down to names that would follow the numerical theme Mother and I had going. You would be number three, and so we were looking at names like... Mitsuha, I think? It's been too long. I can't remember.}

{And then Dad chose this one?}

Nijimi nodded. {Ayaka. It came right out of nowhere, and this choice of kanji, 綾火, was odd. I liked the sound of it, though, and the numerology fit. Back then, neither of us knew how appropriate it would be.}

{How so?}

{城風綾火. Designed to be tough as the fortress, fast as the wind, fierce as the raging fire. That's what you were… no, are, aren't you?}

Ayaka slowly assented.

{Sorry, back to the time. _Katawaredoki_ is indeed part of the reason, but not all of it. You can partially thank the abyssals for that.}

Ayaka's expression jumped right past confusion into staring like her mother had grown a second head.

{When they breached the veil between the material and the supernal, the abyssals weakened it, made it easier than ever to use power drawn from the supernal to alter the material, and possible for the shipgirls to follow, the Natural Borns to Reawaken. In weakening it enough that they wouldn't be constrained to emerging only at twilight, they too liberated shipgirls from that restriction. Not human spirits like me, though. Not yet.}

{And your being here has to do with my Reawakening?}

{Indeed. You see, Ayaka, part of the reason why I couldn't come back sooner was because I hadn't regained conscious self-awareness. I must have been slumbering, for I don't remember clearly anything that happened for some time after my death. I can't tell you if there was any judgment by Izanami or something like that, any watching over everyone from beyond.}

Ayaka had suspected something like that, but that did not make the confirmation any easier to stomach.

Nijimi continued, {I think I read somewhere that the long way down the road to the chemist is just peanuts to space. But that too is quaint compared to the supernal realm, a place of infinite energy and possibility, enough for everything that ever was or will be, bridging every possible afterlife, reality and timeline. Truly there were more things than dreamed of in our philosophy, for _kakuriyo_ is but one aspect of it. I must have drifted a long way while I was unaware, for I wasn't in Kansas any more.}

{And then I Reawakened .}

{Yes. When you connected yourself from the material to the supernal, it was like a sudden candle in the night, one I could somehow tell it was from you.}

{ _Musubi_ ,} Ayaka said, a rush of understanding filling her, memories old yet very recently jogged coming to the fore. {Weaving and knotting, both physical and spiritual, connecting people. Converging and taking shape, twisting and tangling. Though they may unravel and break, they reform and reunite in the end, infinite in distance and time, unbound...} Her voice wavered as the import of the old cant, often recited rotely, finally hit her. {Unbound by death.}

{Yes. _Musubi_ , or sympathetic correspondence, as Western belief has it. I followed your light, and so… I am here.}

{So, no _kuchikamizake_ needed?} Ayaka reflexively asked.

{ _Kuchikamizake_?} It was Nijimi's turn to look confused. {What does our traditional alcohol have to do with finding my way to you?}

Ayaka started to fidget. {It's-it's-er, it's a long story.}

She regretted even bringing it up when Nijimi's face told her that gears were turning in her mother's head. { _Kuchikamizake_ … offering a portion of our souls to the gods… when we consume something, it joins our soul… connecting people…} Nijimi suddenly leaned forward, scrutinising. {That is a unique way of linking souls together, one I hadn't thought of before. Did someone connect with you by drinking some of yours ?}

Ayaka squeaked, her face rapidly reddening, and turned away, unable to meet her mother's eyes.

Nijimi laughed. {You'll have to tell me everything someday, my dear.} The laugh quickly turned mirthless before dying out, however. {I don't know why there are differences between now and then. Maybe because of the weakened veil, or maybe because he and you were both alive back then in your own respective timelines, whereas I'm already dead and you're partly supernatural now. I don't have that answer, and much as I really, really wish we had the chance to properly sit down and catch up as a family, that day will not be today. Alas, the cobbler's children have no shoes.}

{Huh?} The non sequitur caught Ayaka off guard.

{There are doubtlessly realities where shipgirls and abyssals doing battle for the fate of mankind can bring down the supernal only so far as to act like the hulls they had in their previous life. But even if you weren't a close follower of their exploits, surely you do know that shipgirl magic isn't limited to just teleporting or firing faster?}

Ayaka had to concede that she did know that little at least. The whole magic warship thing had gotten around on far too many avenues and platforms to be some elaborate hoax. Still… {I can do more? But what?}

Nijimi pointed upwards. {If I might guess… Look to the sky. Therein lies your answer.}

Ayaka looked up at where her mother was pointing and saw, frozen in place, the shells she had thought would end her life. Then she looked down at the unmoving waters beneath, and realisation slowly began to sink in.

{Yes, that too is _musubi_. This isn't a show where people can talk freely in the midst of danger for no reason; we can converse unmolested only by drawing on your power.} Nijimi frowned abruptly. {Unfortunately, the irony is that we're running out of it. You will not be making magic at this level again too soon; it seems a connection to the supernal might be especially strong when first forged and when it is about to break because of the user's death, though that is altered and mediated by how long the link exists and the user's connection with things physical and spiritual.}

Ayaka wouldn't be able to explain exactly why, but what her mother had just said gave her pause. {Er, could you explain that last bit further?}

Nijimi's eyes flicked up in thought. {Like a muscle, the ability to use magic - your "bandwidth", if you will, for how much you can call on - grows with use, time and experience, but its rate of growth can be changed by our connections. Connections with other physical objects, like your previous body, or links with others social, physical, historical, emotional… More categories to cover in detail than we have time right now.} She sighed. {And speaking of time… I should go soon, lest I disappear mid-word.}

Ayaka started, even as she noticed her surroundings distort and flicker.

The reaction had not gone unnoticed. {That… Has happened before to you, then?} Nijimi asked, brows furrowed in concern.

Ayaka nodded slowly and stiffly. {Yes, and it took more than 8 years before I found him again.}

{But you did find him again?}

Ayaka nodded, more firmly this time.

{That's what matters. It's good that you did, and that you remember how it came together.} Nijimi smiled wistfully. {Treasure him while you can.}

{Yes… Gran said that both she and you had strange dreams before too, but could never cling to them.} Frankly, Ayaka wasn't sure if Ichiyo had actually told her that before, but she knew Uileag-in-her had been told, and that was close enough.

{Indeed.} Nijimi looked pensive. {Did we Shirokaze ever have any powers to call our own once? Maybe all the wisdom attributed to me came from unconscious glimpses of the truth via the supernal, but I can only guess. When Mayugoro's fire destroyed our records, we lost too much, including anything that might help you now.} She sighed. {We never did reconcile with our distant cousins after the Schism, did we?}

{If we did, neither you nor Gran told Kagami and I.}

{Probably not, then. Maybe we should have tried to visit the ancestral homeland, made some more effort to reconnect with them.}

{I-} Ayaka was abruptly guilty, reminded that despite having spent a year at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo for the graduate Shinto priest ordainment and qualification course, the thought of trying to track down her distant relatives had never crossed her mind.

{It's not your fault.} 

{Still… if we knew where. There's not even a drawing of our original hometown to go on.} Ayaka snorted despite herself at the parallels. {And after more than two centuries, it'd probably be horribly outdated. All we know for sure now is that we came from somewhere in Gifu, but where exactly…}

{Yes. I imagine you'd know a thing or two now about trying to find something on too little information.}

{Yes... I'll try to manage somehow,} Ayaka said, trying to convince herself. {Surely the Navy would have a clue, with all the study they must have done on shipgirls?}

{We can hope,} Nijimi said. {Still, I really regret not having had the chance to guide you and Kagami properly through your developmental years. I won't apologise for what Imamura's people gave me credit for - trying to pretend I didn't have talents or, worse, Bergeronian repression of them in pursuit of faux equality would be a disservice to everyone - but perhaps I might have been able to properly initiate you, help you come to terms with what it meant… Means to be my firstborn and the next head of our lineage.}

{Alas, that ship has sailed,} Ayaka said, then winced at the unintentional pun.

Her mother chuckled lightly. {Still, Ayaka, might I offer some final words of advice?}

{Yes! Of course!} More hesitantly, she added, {But "final" carries these connotations…}

{For now, then.} Nijimi's countenance turned grim. {You can't save everyone. It's a noble sentiment and I don't want to stop you, but you need to know that we're not gods, and you will fail sooner or later. You need to learn to let go, to stop blaming yourself. If you can't, so it is with the situation you face now. Old foes have become friends, but so too have friends given themselves over to an ideal far beyond reason and lost themselves in the process.}

{I know that, Mom.}

{Do you, really?}

There was an alien intensity now in her mother's eyes, one that Ayaka had never seen before, and it took everything she had to meet it evenly rather than flinch away and avert her eyes as had been her wont. {I don't know,} she eventually confessed.

Nijimi nodded, the harshness of her gaze dying down as she did so in favour of distant sadness. {You may have my looks, but you definitely inherited Yoshimichi's ability to take the wrong things to heart and hold onto them beyond reason.}

Ayaka wanted to disagree, to say that no, she wouldn't have let herself be consumed the way her father had.

With effort, she forced herself to stop, because her mother had hit the nail on the head once more. {You're… absolutely right, Mom. I have been, and I'm not sure how much the therapy has helped.}

Nijimi smiled wearily. {I wish I could help you with that, but that's a demon you'll have to slay yourself.}

Ayaka sighed. {I feared as much.}

Nijimi gestured off to the side, where Iowa was being very interested in the frozen tableaux of the abyssal carrier battle group and the munitions they had been firing. {I know Other You wishes she had been able to win glory in battle with a peer opponent, make more of her existence, but not all of us are going to play first fiddle. Sometimes that's not our lot in life.}

{I don't know about glory, or how I can get her - myself? - to accept that,} Ayaka said doubtfully. {It's one thing to run away from your purpose. When I was younger, all I wanted was to get away from Imamura, experience the perceived glamour of city life. I wasn't thinking very far ahead regarding my future then. It's another thing if, like Other Me, one wasn't given a chance. It was never in her hands.}

{Well, it's probably not fair of me to say something about learning to accept your circumstances,} Nijimi said. {Then again, I must admit it was a lot more straightforward when I was an adolescent myself. The Shrine was everything and that was all that mattered. I didn't dream of a better, more dazzling life in the big city. Might you have been the same if I had been around for you? I don't know.} She shook her head sadly, paused briefly, then added, {That brings me to my next point. Just because not everyone is going to be famous and great doesn't mean that you should go to the other extreme.}

{What do you mean?}

{One thing you'll learn soon, if you haven't already, is that there are people and organisations that think no one is indispensable. Which, from a cosmic perspective, is technically true.} Nijimi looked skyward, up at the countless stars above. {A universe billions of lightyears across, just one reality of who knows how many. From that angle, little of what we do on this miniscule rock matters in the greater scheme of things, and yet somehow people continue to find ways to devalue each other even further, whether negligently or maliciously.} She looked back at Ayaka. {How many people remember the Cometfall?}

A low growl involuntarily escaped Ayaka's throat, spurred in part by the memories of younger Uileag's ignorance. {Too few. Far too few. No annual memorials beyond maybe a perfunctory mention or what we ourselves organise. FEMA aid was just enough to help resettle, and it otherwise petered out fast. A mere 3 years past, even in the timeline where I and over 500 of us died, and people had already forgotten the loss of Imamura. Even NASA didn't manage to use it to squeeze more funds out of Congress. It was…} Ayaka struggled for the right words. {It doesn't haunt my dreams the way you do, and I vaguely understand that we were just some disposable small town out in the sticks where no one even died, but it…} The bitter sarcasm dripping from Ayaka's words gave way to a small, defeated whimper. {It was a glimpse into how Dad must have felt after we lost you and he alone seemed the only one affected.}

{Like no one cared?}

Ayaka nodded mournfully.

{Yes, and that is perhaps one of our biggest flaws as people. It's too easy to stop caring, or to never bother at all.} Nijimi looked distantly contemplative. {Maybe fate, the cosmos and gods play games with us mortals, unevenly distributing perks and drawbacks for reasons we can scarcely fathom, but that's all the more reason to treasure each other, especially those that our ability-obsessed society despises as incompetent or worthless. That's not even getting in those broken souls who hide behind masks of normalcy, unable or unwilling to let their vulnerability be seen. We all need compassion, even those of us who don't look like it.}

{That's a noble goal, Mom,} Ayaka said, {but one I'm not sure I can live up to.}

{I know, but we must aspire to it. If we reduce each other to how we might profit from our interactions, whether materially or less tangibly, without considering those who cannot repay, what does that make us?} Nijimi's gaze sharpened again. {You might hear "as above, so below" a lot in the future, but the reverse, "as below, so above", is equally important. What we do now echoes in eternity, and links in the mortal realm shape more than the ability to use magic. All the world is poorer when someone dies without a fellow to mourn him, or worse, goes down in history despised for mistakes and failings. Few can bring anything with them on the final journey across the veil, but if one is honoured in death by more than just a detached undertaker or record-keeping bureaucrat, then that makes all the difference, for it is in passing that we achieve immortality.}

More gently, Nijimi added, {Not one sparrow might fall to the ground outside the gods' care, and all the hairs on our heads are numbered, but we are not gods and they do not expect us to have the same capacity. Start small. Perhaps take time to follow someone on her final journey who otherwise will be remembered only for her failures.}

{I… I can try,} Ayaka said hesitantly, discomfited by the morbid thought.

{I know you will.} After a pause, Nijimi added, {Oh, yes, another thing. On the subject of grandchildren…}

{EHHHHH?!} Ayaka exclaimed, then squeaked in realisation, her cheeks reddening again.

Oh, _Kami_ , she really did sound that shrill when screaming.

With a more measured tone, she managed to say, {Mom! Is now really the best time?}

{Yes.} There was absolutely no amusement or lighthearted teasing in Nijimi's tone. {If not now, I don't know when I'll be able to broach it again. Remember, I don't know when I'll be able to see you again. Worst come to worst, it might not be till you die too.}

The dead seriousness of her mother's delivery, far from that of a nagging parent asking when her child would hurry up and get married, had extinguished Ayaka's embarrassment as surely as if she had been dunked in the waters underfoot, and she could only nod in acknowledgement.

{Have you given it any thought?}

Ayaka frowned and unconsciously rubbed her belly. {I know I want to have kids someday, but I don't know yet when, how many or why.}

{"Why?"} Nijimi looked oddly at her daughter.

{Yes, why. Gran hasn't exactly been saying it every day or even every week, but she has been hinting that she's worried about the future of our bloodline. I can't quite blame her… Dad will be 64 this year, and even without all this,} Ayaka wiggled her guns, {neither Kagami nor I have been too enthusiastic about taking over. I think she'd like to have at least one great-granddaughter to secure the succession. So, I don't know if I'll be having children really because Uileag and I want, or merely to give her an heir out of duty.}

Nijimi looked downcast. {Add another entry to my long list of regrets then. Maybe if I'd been around longer to raise and teach you the ways properly, Mother might not feel the need to pressure you. Or…}

{Or?}

{Mother and Father never managed to give me a sister no matter how hard they tried.} Nijimi's face turned just the slightest bit pink. {Maybe if you had had an aunt or not been the eldest of my daughters, we would have been able to put this off for a bit longer.} She looked back at Ayaka. {But this isn't about me or a hypothetical relative. I would rather have had the chance to properly discuss this with you, but that's not possible now. Some food for thought, though, if I may?}

{Yes?}

{Does it have to be either/or? Is a child, or a marriage, or anything at all less if it's had and done out of obligation rather than free choice?}

Ayaka stared, unable to come up with a reply.

Nijimi chuckled, taking some of the sting out of the question. {Maybe those who have not seen and yet have believed are blessed, but for the rest of us, we need a more obvious push to believe that the gods work in us. Whether you want to reciprocate, be it by continuing the bloodline or some other way, is a question you'll have to answer yourself. In the end, all I can really say is that having children is immensely personal; think about it, discuss it with others if you need, but ultimately no one, not even Mother, can make the choice for you. You're more than old enough now, hard though it is for me to reconcile that with the sad 11-year old I last remember.} The smile that had formed turned sad again. {Whatever you do, though, just don't regret it halfway.}

{Wow, no pressure, Mom,} Ayaka said, managing to somehow keep it less bitingly sarcastic than she had expected it to sound.

Her surroundings distorted again, and out of the corner of her eye she noticed the incoming shells restart moving, even if achingly slowly, prompting her to double-check that she was out of the way.

{We're really out of time now, but there's one last thing I need to do.} Nijimi took off the hat she was wearing and held it out. Understanding, Ayaka bowed and let her mother put it on her head. {Please look after my favourite hat.}

{I will.}

"And Iowa!" Nijimi called out, switching to English.

"Huh, yes?" Iowa replied as she turned around, surprised by the sudden address.

"I'll leave my daughter in your care from now on."

"I'll do my best, but if she wants something badly enough, the avatar can't override the present life."

"Do what you can."

"Yes, Mother."

"Sorry?" Nijimi blinked owlishly at the non sequitur. "Shouldn't you be calling Mrs Wallace that, not me?"

"You are my current life's mother, which in a way makes you my stepmother."

Nijimi raised a hand to her chin in thought. "I suppose that's one way of looking at it." She turned back to Ayaka and was promptly enveloped in a hug that was very reluctantly released.

{I guess this is it, then. Take care of yourself, and don't try to wait for my return, because I don't know when I can,} Nijimi said.

Ayaka's eyes shone with tears. {Yes... _Sayonara, kaasan_.}

{Farewell? No, Ayaka.} Nijimi shook her head vigorously. {Remind your father of what I told him then and I tell you now: This is still not farewell, merely goodbye until we meet again.}

Ayaka nodded weakly. { _Mata kondo_ , then. I love you, Mom.}

{Yes, until next time. I love you too, my dear.} She smiled.

And then, between blinks of an eye, Nijimi Shirokaze was gone again like she had never been there.

{5 Centimetres Per Second Original Soundtrack - Everyday Distant Memories}

Youtube watch?v=CrMK737zTD0

Ayaka stared at the spot where her mother had been just a moment before. A dreadfully familiar feeling of loss, 16 years old yet simultaneously freshly resurgent, welled up, and it threatened to drag her down again. Despite her rational knowledge now that death truly was no longer the final end, she could not prevent the tears from escaping.

"Only… only just a little more… just a little bit longer…" She whispered, arm raised like she could reach out and pull her mother back across the veil between realms.

A hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed it gently, causing her to turn and regard Other Her. "Sorry, I'm such a wreck. I'm trying to tell myself that I'm still fighting here and now isn't the time to break down, but…"

"You can't stop yourself."

"No. No, I can't," Ayaka confessed. "This probably wasn't what you expected your new life to be like, was it?"

Iowa laughed. "Come now, you think going through basic automatically makes fearless berserkers of people? No, some of my boys back then were just as confused and scared as you are. I'd be more concerned about anyone who isn't the slightest bit frightened by going into real combat." The amusement drained out of her tone. "I may not have actually known what it was like to have a mother - talk about Mrs Wallace aside - but my boys did, and so I have some vague secondhand idea of how that feels. If I had a choice, I wouldn't have dragged a hapless innocent like you into fighting my battles for me."

"But that's how it is, unfortunately."

"Unfortunately, yes. So let's finish up here and you can confront the problem at your own pace."

Ayaka nodded and made to wipe the tears away.

"Let me have the helm for now. I want to, ah… enjoy what it feels like to be alive while I can."

"Sorry?" Ayaka didn't like the sound of that.

"When the next dawn comes, I'll be returning to the core of our soul," Iowa said, a tinge of sadness colouring her words. "A voice in the back of your head once more, living and experiencing sensations at a remove, unless you deliberately waste… mana, I think the term is… to manifest me. You'll have to relearn all this fighting stuff beyond basic control."

"That doesn't sound fun," Ayaka said worriedly.

"Lighten up a little. President Roosevelt said we're a happy ship!"

Ayaka gave her a stern look. "Pot, kettle, Ms Landscape Decorator."

Iowa sighed. "Can we not make a competition of our wishes and regrets? You dropped this, by the way." She handed over Ayaka's umbrella, even as Ayaka's turrets orientated and fired a barrage that started crawling soon after leaving the barrels. "Might want to do something about that."

Ayaka squinted at the slow-moving shells. "About what? The shells?"

"Yeah, if you could figure out a way to keep them moving at full speed when our spells are active, that would be good."

Ayaka frowned. "I don't know, I'm as new to this as you are."

"Something else to think about, then. By the way," she pointed at the pocket holding Ayaka's phone, "I liked the music that was around when I got reactivated, and I'm glad people are still making that sort of thing."

Ayaka regarded the fairy that had found its way into said pocket and was navigating her phone with some confusion, which only intensified when her rigging's sound system popped and squealed with test tones. "Didn't the earphone jack get removed back with the Seven? How is this a thing?"

"Very carefully," Iowa said, even as engineering fairies chattered excitedly with technical terms that went over Ayaka's head. "Those who cannot remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but from what digging through our head has shown, there is definitely something I wish we were repeating right now."

"What's that?"

"A little something our people learned after First Pearl… Found it." Iowa's face abruptly twisted into a toothy, feral grin, one Ayaka found very disturbing to see her own face wearing, even as a pounding synthwave track began laying out beats at a volume that should have blown Ayaka's eardrums out. "Embracing the

{Furi Original Soundtrack feat. Waveshaper - Wisdom of Rage}

Youtube watch?v=Yrm_kb1d-Xc

===[===]===

Next time on _Kimi no Na Iowa._ :

===[===]===

{XCOM 2 Original Soundtrack - Squad Loadout}

Six figures in decidedly non-regulation attire burst from a building and made a beeline for a XV-23.

===[===]===

"Amalgam Five, your mission is simple: Eliminate all hostiles, secure the VIP and hold the AO until relieved."

===[===]===

"Is this a Code Jotun?"

===[===]===

The six shipgirls unbuckled and rose to their feet even as the loading ramp began to lower, revealing the water speeding by close underneath. The wind was howling like a pack of wolves, creating quite the din.

===[===]===

"It's hot drop o'clock!"

===[===]===

The abyssals did their best.

===[===]===

"Initiating artillery spotting mode."

"Covering."

"Overwatch."

"Eyes peeled, Commander."

"Overwatch, aye aye."

===[===]===

Their best wasn't good enough.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes:

So, the second main heresy: MAGIC, SON!

We originally had not intended for Ayaka/Iowa's hat to be a gift from Nijimi, but while rewatching KnNW, we noticed that one of the scenes in the Miyamizu family flashback had Futaba holding a sun hat, and so we decided to make both of them the same thing.

Happy belated Mother's Day. For those of us whose mothers are still alive, please treasure them despite their flaws. In the real world, the dead don't get to come back. :'(


	6. Chapter 5

Authors' Notes: More "Do you even US Navy" incoming. Advice on brevity codes and things like that would be appreciated.

===[===]===

CHAPTER FIVE

===[===]===

The same time

===[===]===

Klaxons shrieked, shattering the evening calm at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey.

"Gonzalez Team to Cloudy Sky. Gonzalez Team to Cloudy Sky. This is not a drill. Repeat, Gonzalez Team to Cloudy Sky…"

{XCOM 2 Original Soundtrack - Squad Loadout}

YouTube watch?v=o55lI6j-hZw

Shortly afterwards, the tarmac found itself pounded as six figures in decidedly non-regulation attire burst from a building and made a beeline for a XV-23 with engines spooling up. Charging up the rear loading ramp, they clambered into the jump seats and strapped in hurriedly.

"Gonzalez Team, sound off," ordered a grey-eyed brunette. There was an ornament on the young woman's head resembling a stack through which some of her hair threaded. She wore a red neckerchief with white stripes and a small anchor, and a big red belt held her short-sleeved, waist-length white dress in place. "One."

"Two," said a white-haired, blue-eyed young woman with a blue diamond tattoo under her left eye, seated with ruler-straight back against the seat. Her hair was tied with a thick blue ribbon holding a gold radar dish and some black winglike thing. She wore white gloves, a long-sleeved, gold-striped white blouse under a brown jacket and cape. She also wore a brown skirt with side slits and a gold-buckled belt, brown gartered thighhighs and dark brown kneehigh boots.

"Quin-three!" chirped a blue-haired, red-eyed teenage girl. She wore a miniature blue garrison cap on a head of long hair and a blue sailor uniform with white, cross-patterned collar and ribbon. The outfit was completed by white kneehighs and brown shoes.

"Four," squeaked another blue-haired teen, but this one wore her hair short, with an ahoge, ornaments like cat ears and brown eyes. Her sailor uniform had a white blouse with a blue collar and red scarf, white fingerless elbow gloves, blue miniskirt and white thighhighs, ending in platform shoes like miniature ships.

"Five," grumbled in an Irish brogue a tween girl who might have been cute if she was not scowling, her blue eyes locked sullenly on the floor. Her red hair was a dyejob, the roots showing them to have originally been blonde, partially tied at the sides with blue and white ribbons mounting miniature cannon and boasting a heart-shaped ahoge that bounced in defiance of its owner's bad mood. She wore a sailor dress, white at the top, blue at the bottom, with puffy short sleeves, a white collar, stars and a single stripe along the hem. She also wore a red and white bowtie. Black pantyhose and shoes closed off the outfit.

"Six," lazily drawled another girl, this one with aqua eyes. She had blonde hair that turned to aqua at the ends, with an ahoge and worn in twintails tied with miniature torpedo tubes. Slouched relaxedly in her seat, she had discarded a Service Dress Blues jacket to reveal a star-spangled bikini.

Satisfied that all were present, the white-haired young woman hit in a pattern the bulkhead separating the passenger cabin from the pilots. So prompted, the loading ramp shut and the tiltjet rose with a hum from the ground, then reconfigured for horizontal flight and shot off northwards.

There was a series of beeps, and then a screen mounted on the bulkhead turned on, showing "Incoming transmission" and a quickly-filling progress bar that resolved into first the seal of the Department of the Navy, then the not quite hexagonal command emblem, and finally a woman wearing the insignia of a US Navy Captain standing in an operations room. At the sight of her, all of the passengers straightened up. "CAPT Cecil, Ma'am!" they shouted as one.

"Task Group 183.9.5, at ease," CAPT Lyra Cecil said. "We don't have much time, Amalgam Five, so I'll be quick. The AO is New York Bay. Fort Hamilton and the Brooklyn Navy Yard are under attack by abyssal raiders. 5-ship; one Ru, one Wo, three Is. There is an unknown shipgirl on station combatting them. Your mission is simple: Eliminate all hostiles, secure the VIP and hold the AO until relieved. USS _Mitscher_ is en route for fire support. Cloudy Sky will return for exfiltration after disembarking Amalgam Nine. Questions?"

"Ma'am, how did abyssals get so close to our shores?" The brunette in the white dress asked. "Surely we were anticipating a retaliation after Task Force VALKYRIE reclaimed Pearl recently. Is there a problem with our Infrastructure?"

"Reclaimed? No, you mean liberated!" Chirped the one with the long blue hair, who began whistling something and somehow catching all the instruments by herself.

{Ace Combat 6 Original Soundtrack - The Liberation of Gracemeria}

YouTube watch?v=YhdNjzX4waA

"Your guess is as good as mine, Sara," Cecil said, steadfastly ignoring the whistler with ease born of longsuffering. "I don't envy whoever is on duty, though, being responsible for breaking a record of nearly 4 months without an attack on the CONUS. Heads are going to roll for this, no matter what miracle Admiral Nagara pulls off."

The teen with the cat ear ornaments shifted in her seat and her mouth opened and closed without saying anything.

"Yes, Atlanta?"

"Even-" she paused to take a deep breath , and her next words came out in a slightly more measured tone. "Even bearing in mind how bad it was before the End of Terror?"

Cecil shook her head sadly. "I'm afraid so."

"Is this a Code Jotun?" The white-haired young woman, whose only concession to being told to be at ease was unlocking her straightened arms, asked.

The words drew immediate shivers from everyone except the whistler, even Cecil not being spared. "Negative, Wash. We have no sign of unknown Or energy signatures beyond that most likely consistent with the unknown shipgirl."

"What about ID on the unknown shipgirl?"

"Negative. Analysts are still trying to determine who she could be."

"How's the betting pool on whether she's a Sierra Mike or a November Bravo, Ma'am?" The blonde in the star-spangled bikini asked.

Cecil's lips twitched slightly. "No comment, Albie. No-wait one. Downlinking a feed from a Global Hawk now." The frame with her shrunk and moved to one corner as the rest of the screen filled with a view of New York City centred on the Narrows, where the unknown shipgirl was trading fire with the abyssal CSG, occasionally Stepping clear when the concentration of shelling and incoming bombers proved too thick. To one side, one could see smoke and flames from the burning buildings of Fort Hamilton.

"Primarily guns, not a carrier. That size… Battleship? Heavy cruiser?"

Warning tones sounded a few times, cutting off further speculation as a red light appeared near the back end of the cabin.

"LZ is hot, so you'll be making a hot drop. Feed will be sent to your tablets. Please call in the missiles; Iteration wants some data on the mods under actual combat conditions. Give 'em Hell, girls. Gonzalez Actual out." The screen winked out.

The six shipgirls unbuckled and rose to their feet even as the loading ramp began to lower, revealing the water speeding by close underneath. The wind was howling like a pack of wolves, creating quite the din. Even before reaching full speed, the EnOsprey was already slicing through the air supersonically, propelled by disproportionately softly-humming hypertech engines.

"Jump in T-15," the crew chief announced as they lined up, fast ones at the back, fastest ones at the front.

"T-10.

"Five.

"Four.

"Three.

"Two.

"One."

The light turned green. "Go, go, go!"

{Paul van Dyk - Nothing But You}

watch?v=j9u2DtCJde8

Some shipgirl - probably Shimakaze - had discovered by accident early on that soft water was fully in effect for shipgirls. Didn't matter how fast what they had fallen from was going or what height they had started at, as long as they landed on water they wouldn't take any damage.

It was a benefit that had been ruthlessly exploited, especially in the days before the first EnOspreys came out of prototyping, to do full-speed airdrops of shipgirl quick reaction forces just outside battleship main gun range. Close enough for battleships to begin engaging and subcapital shipgirls to start Stepping into effective range, far enough that dual purpose and anti-aircraft cannon could not tear the transports apart or combat air patrols (CAPs) intercept them.

Atlanta and Saratoga went first, landing cleanly on the water with hardly any mess. The former wobbled a bit but quickly regained her balance.

Washington and the grumpy Irish _colleen_ hit the water hard, slamming into it with three-point landings that sent water splashing everywhere from the point of impact.

"It's hot drop o'clock!" The one with the long blue hair shouted as she, along with Albacore, plunged right into the water.

"Quincy, you _oinseach_ , you're lucky we don't sink the moment we get submerged!" The Irish one shouted.

"Don't be a wet blanket, Banny!" Quincy replied, her 0v0 giving way to a pout as she Stepped back onto the surface, Albacore's head popping up at the same time that she did so. "You always say that!"

"Cut the chatter," Washington instructed as their riggings manifested and quickly unfolded and they spread out into combat separation, reorienting towards the enemy. "Six, rear security."

"Aye, aye," Albacore said and disappeared beneath the water once more.

"Gonzalez One, rolling strike package! It's all yours, my kids!" Saratoga, who had immediately turned into the wind after landing, shouted. A flight deck modelled after a Thompson submachine gun had manifested in her left hand as part of her rigging, and she raised it and fired a long burst, the bullets exploding into planes and flew off in the direction of the abyssals indicated by the drone feed. These quarters, tight by seafaring standards, meant there was little difficulty finding the raiders, and the Wo obligingly vectoring its CAP to meet them just made it easier.

Guns blazing, Saratoga's planes promptly swooped down on the Wo, fighters charging forward to engage its CAP even as the bombers took advantage of the distraction.

There was a short, violent exchange, but the outcome was not in doubt. With its own strike package depleted from being sent against the unknown shipgirl, what little the Wo could muster to handle this new threat axis quickly proved mostly inadequate.

Mostly.

"Gonzalez Team, we have leakers. Bandits inbound," Saratoga announced.

"One, Four, copy that." The vane-shaped electricity that had extended from Atlanta's hair ornaments during the manifestation of her rigging now crackled and popped as it flowed down and over her guns and arms. "I've got you in my sights," she growled, her voice dipping momentarily into the guttural.

With a few gestures, her cannons roared and spat, turning the air into a storm of high velocity metal even as higher velocity lightning lashed out, and the survivors evaporated. "Multiple bandits splashed."

"One copies."

Saratoga's bombers had not been idle. Air-launched torpedoes lanced through the water despite the almost valiant efforts of the Wo's anti-aircraft guns to swat the bombers out of the air, the Is terminally distracted by the unknown and too far forward to offer more than patchy assistance. A torpedo caught the Wo in an ankle despite its attempts to dodge, the explosion causing its now maimed form to fall even as its attire tore. Two more slammed into its side and sealed the deal. The water quickly claimed the humanoid abyssal's corpse.

"Splash one carrier. Gonzalez, air supremacy achieved. Stand by, confirming visuals." Saratoga pulled out a tablet and, after a hesitant look at the screen, passed it to Atlanta, who quickly found the program with the drone feed and activated it, then passed it back. A quick comparison with her own planes' views later, and she went back to her radio. "Actual, One. Drone feed matches Sierra Golf view. Over."

With radar, infrared and various other sensors having difficulty seeing abyssals as anything other than human-sized or sometimes slightly bigger, the Mark 1 Eyeball was the final fallback. Yet there was always this lingering fear that even electro-optical solutions like satellite or drone cameras might someday, somehow be confounded, leaving mankind regressing to binoculars to fight. It was a concern far from limited to the diehard old guard who still rankled at how shipgirls had upset the paradigm, and thus it was protocol for drone feeds to be compared with what shipgirls saw as a precaution against such diablerie.

"One, Actual," CAPT Cecil said. "Copy that. Continue to engage. Out."

"Yeah! Now it's a real _craic_ , it is! A real shipgirl fights a battleship at CLOSE RANGE!" O'Bannon shouted, leaning into a fighting stance. A bunch of potatoes popped into existence and began orbiting her.

"Belay that, Five," Washington said. "Two, initiating artillery spotting mode. Cover me."

"Acknowledged, Two," Saratoga responded. "Covering."

"Quin-three, that thing that isn't Team Fortress 2!" She began humming another tune.

{Overwatch Original Soundtrack - The World could always use more Heroes}

YouTube watch?v=haQOcQAiO94

Atlanta sighed at Quincy, but refrained from voicing any further commentary. "Four, eyes peeled."

"Come on, Mom!" O'Bannon growled, frustrated, but dutifully raised her cannons and fell in line. "Five, Overwatch, aye aye."

Washington glowed green briefly, a holographic icon of a SOC Seagull scout plane appearing above her followed by two "banners" showing 16"/45 caliber Mark 6 guns, and then the cadence of her guns' fire went straight past "enthusiastic drummer" into "drumming troupe from Hell on more stimulant drugs than an illegal rave" as she became a one-shipgirl artillery battalion.

Shipgirl and abyssal battleship guns - and to a lesser extent those on cruisers - faster-firing though they were than their steel hull counterparts, were not exactly capable of putting out a wall of lead like secondary cannons could.

Not normally, anyway.

Which was where artillery spotting mode came in. The exact mechanism was still being studied, but the leading theory was a self-application of Time, making the guns recycle much faster than they normally could.

Certain quarters had dubbed it "Siege Mode". It was not a very accurate analogy, but they were right about one thing. Artillery spotting mode might not totally immobilise the user, but it still hampered mobility by preventing Stepping. A problem if there were superior numbers or hostile air power to contend with, even if one relied on sheer weight of fire to overcome the inability of a spotter plane to maintain contact.

With the enemy aviation depleted and OpFor outnumbered, however, that would be no problem at all.

"Four, bring the rain," Saratoga ordered while Washington was busy putting a storm of lead downrange.

"Aye, One." Atlanta switched channels on her radio. "Mitscher, Gonzalez Four. Requesting fire support, over. Grid DB019079, over. One Ru, three Is in the open, HEAPLRASM in effect. Radiating. Affirm rider mods, over."

There was a brief pause before _Mitscher_ replied. "Gonzalez, Mitscher. Read you five by five. Bulldogs affirm. Rider mods affirm. Wait one…" Hurried orders could be faintly made out. "Telemetry is good. Coordinates received, firing for effect. Out."

Far from the front, Vertical Launch System cell covers flipped open. Roaring and blazing with great sound and fury, signified the employment of 18 Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles.

Under normal conditions, one would have led with the land-based air support - or, in these 21st century times, cruise missiles - far in advance of even naval aviation, to say nothing of getting into shelling range. These were not normal times, however.

Fact: Conventional sensors had difficulty targeting abyssals (and shipgirls, if - touches wood - it came to that).

Fact: Shipgirls could target abyssals just fine with their own sensors. Somehow. Despite the insistence of many a scientist and radar technician who had indignantly exclaimed that a radar beam should be a radar beam regardless of the source.

So someone had a bright spark, and that had led to Artifex, Vestal, Yuubari and the other engineers, shipgirl and baseline alike, of Task Force VALKYRIE having one big international hackathon to cobble together a means of letting conventional anti-ship weapons receive telemetry from shipgirl sensors.

It meant going back to semi-active homing - active tracking even with full-sized systems, never mind missiles, was still very much a work in progress, and forget firing first while hoping there would be a shipgirl designator at the receiving end - and was still being debugged. Anything was better, however, than munitions sitting around on their launchers for want of a lock, doing their best stormtrooper impressions, or having poor weapons operators try to use manual command to line of sight TV guidance.

The surviving abyssals were still making almost valiant attempts to fight back. The Ru was returning fire as best as it could while dodging the barrage Washington was laying down, and the Is were alternating between putting out point defence fire in an attempt to deflect the incoming shells and saturating the water with torpedo spreads.

All it did was buy time. Washington's shells found their mark at last; one punched into the Ru's head, at least three made its torso, and more tore through its shield-cannons and legs.

The subsequent detonations ripped it apart.

After some hesitation the Is turned and started charging for the unknown. Apparently, they had decided in whatever passed for a CIC of theirs that if they had nowhere to run and were going to sink, they would try to take her with them.

And then the missiles went marching in.

The LRASMs roared as they rocketed in, the flames of their exhausts dangerously close overhead as they hugged the waves. The heat could be felt by the shipgirls they overflew, even if it wouldn't actually hurt. It was no problem at all to retarget now that the Ru had been sunk.

Once they got within effective anti-air range of the 5-inchers, they began juking rapidly to throw off the point defence solutions.

The Is did their best.

They could not Step, but they threw themselves around as randomly as they could to try and throw off the incoming missiles. In the meantime, they filled the air thick with 5in, 40mm and 20mm rounds, trying to intercept the impending doom before it met them.

Their best was not good enough.

18 LRASMs, rebuilt with tungsten carbide cores to counter the abyssal armour and aforementioned hypertech beamrider mods, rose from wave height like flaming steel angels… and then they turned back down, now in top attack mode, and hurled themselves at the abyssals.

Three would have gone into the water from narrow misses; proximity sensors, intended to cause detonation if crashing into water was imminent, worked as planned, but even mediocre destroyer armour bounced the shrapnel.

Four were caught by sheer weight of flak and torn apart before they could deliver their payloads. The penetrators within were made of sterner stuff, but without propulsion they just fell undignified into the water.

That left 11.

"Smited" was a pretty good way of describing what followed.

"Mitscher, Gonzalez Four. Mods worked as planned. 18 bulldogs fired, successfully retargeted after splashing of battleship. Three dodges, four intercepts, 11 successful hits. Splash three destroyers. Over."

"Gonzalez Four, Mitscher, copy that. Will feedback to Dr Sheng. Standing by for further instructions. Over."

"Roger. Gonzalez Four out." Atlanta nodded to the rest of the team.

"Four, Five, security shots," Washington instructed.

Atlanta and O'Bannon tossed a few depth charges after the sinking abyssal corpses and were rewarded with the crumps of underwater detonations. They backed away to get some space, but after five minutes no last-ditch surprise greeted them, and they lowered their guns.

"No pulse, Two," Atlanta said.

Overkill? Maybe, but as CDR R Becket had learned the hard way, abyssals were not steel hull ships. They could and more often than not did keep fighting on past the point where a sane human CO would have made the call to abandon ship and have her scuttled.

Thus, despite Dr Halen's annoyed repeated requests for the shipgirls to exercise restraint, it was standard operating procedure to check for a pulse after seemingly sinking abyssals, turning potentially valuable fragile mechanisms from "trashed" to "totally wrecked" be damned, and it would likely remain so until someone developed a nonlethal means of subduing a captive.

Washington nodded to Saratoga, who nodded back and got on her radio. "Actual, One. AO is secure. Over."

"One, Actual. Copy that. Secure the HVT and hold position until relieved. Over."

"One copies. Out."

Saratoga gestured, and Gonzalez Team advanced towards the unknown at cruising speed. As they did so, she switched over to Guard and began broadcasting in the clear. "Unknown shipgirl, this is USS Saratoga of Task Group 183.9.5, US Navy. Six friendlies on approach. Hold your fire. Repeat…"

A few tense minutes followed, during which the team had no idea if the unknown had mistaken them for abyssals and would begin raining fire down on them any second.

Fortunately, a reply finally came through. "TG 183.9.5, this is USS Iowa. Read you by five by five. Weapons safe. Over."

"Copy that, Iowa. Read you five by five. Stand by for rendezvous. Out."

"Iowa, huh?" Albacore said, peeking out after having received the secure notification. "She sounds pleasant enough. Like a country girl gone…" she waved a hand around at the city they had just saved. "Local."

"There's something odd about this," O'Bannon said.

"What do you mean?" Saratoga asked.

"There's something about her accent I can't place. I think we should be careful."

"You're just still annoyed that the mess asks for ID when you want a pint of Guinness, Banny!" Quincy chirped.

"No, that's not it," O'Bannon said. "And who said just one pint's enough?"

"We'll just remain vigilant," Saratoga said, and that settled it.

Eventually, the two sides drew close enough to get eyes on each other.

Tall. Scarily tall. As much as Saratoga, if the near-identical lengths of their previous bodies was any indication. Long black hair under a white sun hat, brown eyes. Beautiful, but in a strangely unassuming way that didn't keep the eye coming back. Pink/white cardigan over a yellow round neck blouse covering a generous bust, a blue star necklace, darker pink three-quarter pants with a brown belt and yellow flats. She demurely held a blue umbrella in her right hand.

Her rigging extended in four arms from its mount on her back. The lower two were the split bow, gunmetal and red with one three-gun turret each. A third turret had an arm to itself, and a stern occupied the last.

"I don't think that's shipgirl garb. Switching my bet to a November Bravo."

"I don't know, Albie," Atlanta said. "Between the six of us, do you see any common aesthetic?"

Albacore looked between all of them, looked again, then hesitantly said, "You, O'Bannon and Quincy are all wearing sailor-style outfits?"

O'Bannon did some scrutinising of her own, then made a face. "Colour schemes and even general design are all different. Don't be an _oinseach._ "

"You and Albie look like sisters, though," Quincy chirped.

The two of them looked at each other. "Right…" they uttered noncommittally.

They drew up and formed a loose circle around the VIP. "Iowa? Saratoga and TG 183.9.5. We are your relief."

"I stand relieved. Thank you for the assistance. How did you all get here so fast, though?" Iowa asked, tilting her head in confusion. "The nearest base of ours is down in Jersey, ever since…" she hesitated, "my intended homeport… Was shut."

Gonzalez looked at each other. "Can we say?" Atlanta asked over radio, careful not to voice anything via external speaker.

"Affirm. It's on public record," Washington said. "XV-23 EnOsprey," she declared aloud. "Experimental high-speed transport aircraft. You are right; we are indeed based out of JB MDL."

"MDL?" Iowa looked perplexed. "I don't know what that-" a look of slowly dawning comprehension overtook her. "Lakehurst?"

"Yes. Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, merged in 2009."

"Huh? Don't you know about that, old-timer?" Albacore asked.

"Negative, Albacore. Iowa was-may I?"

"Sure," Iowa said.

"Affirm," Washington said. "She was decommissioned in 1990 and struck from the list in 2006. She wouldn't know."

"Oh. Right."

"Apologies, Iowa, we'll have to hold position until our relief arrives," Saratoga said.

"Understood. How are we extracting?"

"Normally we would sail ourselves out or, if the AO is far enough away from base, dock with a shipgirl tender first. Given that we need to secure you, we'll board the transport when it comes back with our relief."

"Shipgirl tender?"

"Yes. It transports us to a closer distance to the AO so we save on exhaustion and fuel that would otherwise be spent on the long-distance approach, in situations that require a large number of deployed shipgirls and/or are not so time-critical as to necessitate an airdrop. Our usual home away from home is the _Bougainville_."

"That's-" Iowa scrunched her face up in thought. "You don't mean the escort carrier from back then?"

"No. It's a new amphibious assault ship, recently delivered."

"I wouldn't know it then… is it a _Wasp_ -class? I last remember the third _Wasp_ back in 1989."

Saratoga raised a hand to her chin in thought, then shook her head and turned to Washington. "Wash?"

"Negative. _America_ -class, the newest."

"I see I've a lot to catch up on."

"Compared to the rest of us? It's nothing!" Albacore pooh-poohed.

After some waiting, Iowa suddenly tensed up and her guns began moving.

Saratoga looked, and then relaxed once she saw what was prompting it, raising a hand in a stopping gesture. "Iowa, stand down. Chick inbound."

Iowa shook her head. "Bogey is sour."

"Negative, Iowa. No factor. Say again, no factor. Your codes are out of date, remember?"

Iowa didn't say anything further, but the guns stopped at least.

"Gonzalez Team, Cloudy Sky inbound. Stand by for extraction," the plane in question radioed in. It streaked in alarmingly quietly for how fast it was going. If it had not called ahead or transmitted IFF, the first sign of its arrival would have been its being seen by the eye; it refused to register on radar and outraced the sound of its engines.

As they watched, another 6-member fireteam of shipgirls leapt from the open loading ramp and formed up. Saratoga's planes quickly got a visual on them.

"Roadrunner One, Gonzalez One. My kids have visual," Saratoga said.

Her counterpart quickly got her own planes in the air even as the newcomers began closing with them. "Copy that, Gonzalez One, my kids have visual on you too."

Once they were close enough, the leader exchanged salutes with Saratoga. "Gonzalez One, we are your relief."

"Roadrunner One, we stand relieved. Proceeding to RTB. See you back at base."

"Aye aye, Gonzalez One. Will see you back at base."

Roadrunner Team set off on their patrol route even as Cloudy Sky finished its bank and came to a hover nearby, loading ramp lowered. One by one, Gonzalez Team deactivated their riggings and Stepped on board.

That left Iowa staring hesitantly at it.

"Come on, it's fine!" Saratoga radioed, though the hum of the engine was soft enough that a good shout would have sufficed. "Just deactivate your rigging and Step up!"

"Are you sure it can hold my weight?" Iowa asked nervously.

"'course, we're all here, aren't we? Chairs, trucks, ships, other planes, never had a problem!" Albacore slapped the fuselage as she turned to Washington. "Right, Wash?"

"Affirmative."

"Whew. That's a relief." Still looking a bit unsure, Iowa nevertheless did as instructed and was soon helped to a seat. After everyone was safely strapped in, the signal was hammered out on the cabin bulkhead and the plane quickly shot off back to base.

===[===]===


	7. Chapter 6

Authors' notes: Some cute before we dive back into the crunch of shipgirl paradigms.

Language warning?

===[===]===

CHAPTER SIX

===[===]===

Someone was shaking Ayaka.

"Ughhh," she moaned in response.

"Wow, you were out like a light the moment you strapped in!" A voice best described as a cocksure drawl said.

"Albacore, don't be rude to our guest," a motherly-sounding voice said.

Ayaka tried to raise her arms, but they felt like lead bars.

"Time to wake up," Iowa said from somewhere inside her.

"Uhhh…"

"Shake your head."

Ayaka shook her head left to right a few times, trying to shake off the bleariness.

"Nod your head."

Ayaka bobbed her head up and blinked rapidly.

"It's time to go. Pull yourself together. It's your time now," Iowa said. "Don't hesitate to wake me when you need me."

"Okay, thank you," Ayaka replied mentally even as she looked around the cabin of a plane of some sort.

The brunette in the white dress, equally of impressive height, was looking concernedly at her. The twintailed blonde in the bikini and the one with short blue hair and a sailor uniform were also looking at her, but in a scrutinising manner. The white-haired one in dark brown was sitting ramrod straight and looking dead ahead like every stereotype Uileag had ever regaled her with of model soldiers. The redhead with the heart ahoge was staring sullenly at the floor of the cabin, which left the one with long blue hair… looking spaced out at nothing in particular.

"Good evening, and welcome to Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst," the brunette said. "We're about to land."

There was a gentle impact and the plane went still, although the surprisingly soft engine sound persisted even as the rear loading ramp lowered.

"Gonzalez Team, disembark!" Brunette - evidently the team leader - shouted.

The other shipgirls undid their restraints and got up; after a moment's struggle, Ayaka followed suit. She was guided to the middle of the line and followed as the... fireteam? Division? strode briskly off.

To one side of the plane, another six-member... team was waiting to board. Ayaka briefly caught the name Coyote Team being bandied about, but being hurriedly ushered into a building as she was, she could not catch much more.

The bikinied one noticed her gaze nevertheless. "Ain't the Skyranger neat?"

Yes, she supposed the modified Osprey frame tiltjet looked good, but… Hey, wait. "Skyranger? I thought it was a… What was that…" the words came to mind as Iowa synced memories. "EnOsprey?"

The other waved a hand dismissively. "Nah, only fuddy-duddies like Wash call it by the official name. Dunno who got us started calling it a Skyranger, but it stuck. What's-his-name was absolutely chuffed-hey, Lanty! What's that guy's name again?"

Short blue hair looked over to them. "Jake?"

"Yeah! Mr Solomon was pleased as punch that we're real…what's that thing, Lant? Ayy Hunters?"

"Mm-hm."

"Yeah, that!"

"Cut the chatter," White hair - Wash? - said.

"See? Fuddy-duddy," Blonde whispered and stuck her tongue out behind the other one's back. Ayaka had to hide her giggle at the antics in a cough.

That done, she was quickly led to a security office, where she made a temporary security pass exchange, then brought to a room where a contemporaneous statement was taken.

"Alright, we'll need to come back to this later. For now, let's go to the wardroom," Brunette said once that was done, getting pointed towards the guts of the building.

Ayaka noticed that everyone perked up at those words; even she of the ruler-straight spine was not immune.

As they progressed through the building, Brunette slowed to carefully pass through a doorway. "Please mind your head!"

"Erm." Ayaka took the door hesitantly.

"Yeah, even with riggings off we still maintain our toughness. Anything that crashes into you at speed… wham!" Blonde pointed out.

Well, that could be a problem. "Does that mean that I need to be careful to not crush someone when I shake hands or hug?"

"Fortunately, no," Short blue hair said. "I don't understand how this… superimposition? Superposition? Juxtaposition? Of our human and ship characteristics works. It's weird, but offensive use of our strength seems to need conscious will. I've never accidentally broken something or someone out of carelessness."

Blonde stopped abruptly in midstep. "Oh yeah, we haven't introduced ourselves properly, have we?" She gestured to Brunette. "Mom, you first."

A look somewhere in between amusement, annoyance and weary resignation flashed over her face. "Saratoga, CV-3."

"Not 60, sadly," Blonde stage whispered to Ayaka.

"Washington, BB-56." White hair.

"Quincy, CA-39!" Long blue hair.

"Atlanta, CL-51." Short blue hair.

"O'Bannon, DD-450…" Redhead with, Ayaka noted curiously, an Irish accent.

"Albacore, SS-218, and together, we're TG 183.9.5, Amalgam Five, Construct Nine, but you can call us Gonzalez Team!"

There was an expectant pause.

It continued.

It grew awkward.

"Ah! Sorry, where are my manners?" Sheepishly, Ayaka extended a hand. "Iowa, BB-61, but I'm actually a… the term's Natural Born, right? Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai. Pleased to meet you." She reflexively did a little bow to go with the hand.

You could hear a pin drop in the resulting stunned silence.

The only one who did not seem affected by the revelation was Quincy, who was still in her happy place if the 0v0 her face wore was any indication.

Saratoga, hand raised to her mouth in surprise, let out a soft "Oh my."

Washington twitched, but otherwise froze in place, her face betraying nothing.

Atlanta blinked and muttered something under her breath, seeming oddly vindicated.

Albacore leaned forward and started scrutinising her like a rare specimen under a magnifying glass.

O'Bannon…

{Metal Gear Solid Original Soundtrack - Alert}

YouTube watch?v=OQiDzSWLIm4

O'Bannon spun on her heels, fast as greased lightning, her visage a mask of demonic rage. "Have a potato, ya N!p!" She roared, even as a potato materialised over her left shoulder and was telekinetically fired, a cracking noise following in its wake as it punched through the sound barrier.

Just an hour ago, Ayaka might have froze in place, like the metaphorical deer in the headlights, at being fired on. This time, however, something residing deeper than conscious thought drove her to move, and she did. Thus, she was already hurriedly jumping out of the way when Quincy stumbled into the line of fire, arms flailing. There was a flash of green so short-lived one could be forgiven for thinking it had been hallucinated and the potato stopped dead, splattered against something, its remains falling to the floor.

"O'Bannon, knock it off!" Washington shouted, catching hold of the destroyer's wrist with a hand. "What are you doing?"

"Let go, Wash!" O'Bannon snarled, trying to wrestle free. "That's a fucking N!p infiltrator over there! I told you all there was something off about her voice! I told you! I fucking told you! I was right!"

"You had no problems working with the Jap...anese shipgirls during Task Force VALKYRIE operations or taking orders from Admiral Nagara. Explain yourself, sailor!"

" _Pogue mahone,_ Wash!" O'Bannon pressed on venomously. "It's not the same and you know it! Them India Juliet November lot least had the decency of wearing meatballs or that golden flower thing so our boys and girls could see they were N!ps and know not to be too friendly. And Admiral Nagara, no, I don't like what she is, but at least I can tell she's half one of them!"

With her free hand, O'Bannon began gesticulating violently in Ayaka's direction. "Not like this infiltrator looking and sounding just like one of us. You heard them N!p ships, right? The few of them that could speak English kept tripping over their grammar, Ls and Rs, Bs and Vs. Not like this here-here-here _ **thing_** that almost sounds like a real country girl gone Noo Yorka! But even one as well-trained as her can't fully hide her true self!"

"I am a 'real country girl gone New Yorker'," Ayaka echoed in an icy, even tone that surprised even herself.

Undeterred or uncaring, O'Bannon continued, "I wouldn't have guessed her to be what she truly is if she hadn't slipped up and used her real name!"

"DD-450, you are out of line. And did you not notice the significance of what you said? Apologise!"

There was some faint, nearly intangible ripple from Washington, but Ayaka couldn't make out in any detail what it was supposed to be.

Whatever it was, though, O'Bannon did not take it so well; with a growl, she finally twisted her arm free of Washington's grip. "What, to this N!p? Fuck that! And especially not after that Mind _pishogue_ you just tried to pull! Trying to make me stow that when I haven't done shit that needs stowing? Not on my watch!"

She began stomping away. " _Glunterpecks_ , the lot of you! I don't know what _geas_ she's placed on you, but that's the only explanation I can come up with for all this bowing and scraping and being eager to please a _gombeen_ over a comrade who you've been fighting alongside for so long. I'm disappointed in all of you."

{That makes two of us.}

O'Bannon froze mid-stride at the sudden sound of a female voice speaking perfectly enunciated Irish, like someone fresh from the Emerald Isle.

{Wat.}

She turned slowly to see Ayaka looking disappointedly down at her, and jumped again, an icy feeling running down her spine, as she found the native-level grasp of Irish had come smoothly out of Ayaka's mouth. {I'm not even mad, you know. Just disappointed.} Ayaka stepped forward, a hand coming up to point not quite at her. {Maybe I am naive, but I was hoping we could set aside our differences and at least pretend to be on the same side.}

{You-what-how-}

{I was vaguely aware that some of us would not give me a fair hearing on account of what I am - too much bad blood, especially from those from sunk in combat - but I wasn't expecting it from you. I was never interested in ships when I was younger, but Other Me has been giving me the Cliff Notes edition.} Ayaka swept an arm out in the direction of the rest of the team. {The details aren't mine to give, but there are others here who I think from what I now know might have more reason to hate, or at least be open about it. Not someone like you who is so decorated and had spent more time in your previous life as an ally to my ancestral homeland rather than an enemy.}

She sighed. {Then again, I know something about how scars in the psyche can be irrational and letting old wounds fester instead of letting go, so I'm in no position to throw stones from my glass house.

{I don't know what you were expecting Iowa to look like when we came back.} Ignoring Quincy's sudden "I know, I know!", Ayaka continued, {It wasn't me?} She paused for a moment. {I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.} She lowered her head apologetically.

O'Bannon was still shaking wordlessly. With surprise or outrage, Ayaka couldn't tell.

{Maybe we could take baby steps? You could pretend to be polite when I'm around and badmouth me all you need in the privacy of your bunk or the head.} A small, sad smile found its way onto Ayaka's face. {It wasn't that long ago, after all, that we Irish were called P ddies and M!cks.}

For a moment, no one said anything.

"AHHH, FUCK!" O'Bannon eventually shouted. "Fuck! I don't-I don't-I can't fucking deal with this right now!" Wringing her hands in anger and frustration, she Stepped away, down the passageway, and quickly disappeared from sight.

"O'Bannon, come back here!" Washington shouted. Turning to Ayaka, she nodded apologetically. "We're very sorry about O'Bannon. She will face disciplinary action for this," she said in a clipped fashion, then whirled to face back down the passageway and, surprisingly noiselessly, starting Stepping herself in pursuit.

The rest of Gonzalez and Ayaka stared after the runners for what felt like a long while.

It was safe to panic now, right? She had been shot at by her own side!

Okay, time to panic.

Three.

Two.

One.

Mark.

Any second now.

Any second…

When she still stubbornly failed to descend into the comforting haze of losing her head, Ayaka took a deep breath, then another. She had never been much into long rants and speeches, and the effort had taken something out of her.

Saratoga stepped forward and apologised profusely. "I'm very sorry about O'Bannon. She-she's never done anything like this before even with the Japanese girls."

"I dunno about that," Atlanta said. "She did like summoning and pointedly playing with her potatoes whenever any of them got near."

"But she never actually opened fire," Saratoga said. "Not unless it happened where no one could see."

There was another silence, which was broken by Ayaka hesitantly asking, "I... Other Me… er, I didn't remember wrongly, did I? O'Bannon did stay afloat the longest of all of us? Technically being even my senior if we only look at in-commission time?"

Gonzalez exchanged looks.

"Washington would know offhand; she memorised all of the history. I'll have to… What's it called, that search thing?" Saratoga asked.

"Google?" Atlanta said.

"Yes, I'll have to look it up."

After another pause, Ayaka gave air to her confusion. "So… I don't want to pry, but would any of you know why she reacted so strongly just now?"

There was another exchange of looks and "er"s.

"I don't think anyone knows for sure," Saratoga said, "maybe not even O'Bannon herself. You said something just now, right?"

She had? "Sorry?"

"Something about irrational psychic scars? Festering wounds and trauma?"

"Oh, yes, I think so?"

Saratoga smiled, or tried. It came out nervous and crooked. "Sudden bright lights leave me uneasy, and I'm not looking forward to summer."

Why was that a concern-

A thought floated to the surface of Ayaka's mind, and she paled slightly. A distantly-remembered factoid or a prompt from Other Her? Whichever it was, she now knew.

"Why I got _that_ in my rotes, I can only guess was some kind of cosmic practical joke," Saratoga whispered almost too softly for Ayaka to catch, even with her newfound acute senses. She didn't pry.

"Not a fan of sudden bright light either," Atlanta said.

Albacore blinked. "Don't ask me. There's a gap where the memory of my last moments should be, stretching even before the immediate sinking."

Ayaka nodded commiseratingly. "I don't remember clearly yesterday 34 years ago either, even though Other Me says it's one of the reasons I Reawakened."

They turned to Quincy, noticed that she was still spaced out, and shrugged in unison.

"Sorry, I don't know if there's any event that might have left lingering trauma for O'Bannon," Saratoga said.

"Oh. Well, I guess there aren't going to be any easy answers to this."

"Though there is something that might have exacerbated it," Atlanta said after some contemplation.

"Mm?"

"O'Bannon, so far as we can tell, Manifested at Pearl on the New Date of Infamy and was part of the fighting retreat."

"Oh." There wasn't much good footage, amateur or not, of Second Pearl, it had been that much of a confused mess, but what did exist had been ugly, to say the least.

"It must have left an impression."

Ayaka nodded, now understanding. "That explains a bit."

"Huh."

"Albacore?" And indeed the person in question had suddenly jerked, as if realising something.

"O'Bannon was afloat, er, alive, er, whatever during the Cold War, right?" The submarine asked.

"We think so?"

"When that guy was making a fuss about Commie lovers?"

"McCarthy? And making a fuss is putting it lightly," Saratoga said, frowning in disapproval.

"Right! I think I know an answer now." Albacore raised her hands while dancing a little jig. "Suspicion of Japanese," she said while shaking her right hand. "Suspicion of Commie infiltrators," she said while shaking her left hand, and then clapped them together. "Tah-dah! Suspicion of Japanese infiltrators!"

The others stared.

Finally, Atlanta said, "Has Quincy been rubbing off on you, Albie?"

Albacore pouted. "Killjoy. You know it makes sense!" Turning to Ayaka, she asked, "By the way, were you speaking to O'Bannon in Irish there?"

"Ah, yes. Er, it's a long story." Ayaka made some awkward gestures indicating she didn't really want to talk about it at the moment.

She really needed to sit down with Uileag sometime soon and figure out a cover story. Magical anthropomorphised warships were one thing, but Ayaka had no idea how people would take the whole "I was swapping bodies with my future boyfriend" deal.

And speaking of Uileag… "Is it fine if I use my phone? I need to contact my family, tell them I'm safe."

"Sure! We're not taking you to any classified areas as it is."

"Great!" Ayaka pulled her phone out and fired off some messages to her family and Uileag telling them that she was fine.

"P.S. I still owe you for all that cake I wasted your money on," she added after her message to Uileag.

"And I'm really sorry for all the diagnostics," he sent back, eliciting a giggle from her.

"Now that's done…" Ayaka turned to Quincy, aware that the heavy cruiser had been saying something while she had been speaking to O'Bannon. "Sorry. You were saying?"

"I know what Banny was expecting you to be like!" she chirped.

"Yes?"

In response, Quincy threw her arms skyward as her 0v0 blossomed into a broad, open-mouthed grin. "Blonde, literally starry blue-eyed, too much to say, too little to wear, _Eigo ga zenzen wakarimasen_!"

Ayaka's head tilted as she blinked in confusion, and not just because Quincy had slipped into a flawless Japanese pronunciation of that last bit while drawing with her hands an exaggerated curvy figure.

She blinked again.

Finally, she uttered, "Wat."

Blonde and blue-eyed, she could understand as a phenotype stereotype. Starry-eyed, maybe to do with the flag? Talkative, loudmouthed, yes, that was a prevailing stereotype of Americans. Skimpy dress… in all frankness, she had no idea how the US had cultivated that perception of immodesty while simultaneously freaking out over stray nipples, but okay.

Completely unable to speak English, or nearly so?

How about no.

Her confusion must have gotten noticed, for Quincy added, "Okay, maybe not _zenzen_. _Amari_?"

That did absolutely nothing for Ayaka's bewilderment, though it did give her the strangest feeling O'Bannon had been expecting someone who could discuss the methods of corn production like Other Her's namesake was good at.

"Come on, I wasn't even in commission in 1959, much less able to talk to Khrushchev about agriculture," Other Her said mentally. "Where did that even come from, though?"

"Aren't you supposed to be asleep?" Ayaka thought back.

"Not in active control of our body, no, but I still have minimal awareness. A bit like… what's that thing you have? Alexa? HomePod?"

"Forget it, Iowa. It's Quincy," Albacore said, unaware of the internal byplay.

Ayaka turned back to the submarine, even as Quincy kept rambling on, her delivery degrading into Engrish. Something about "me _ga_ Iowa". "Eh?"

"We suspect something went wrong with Quincy's summoning, or maybe her stay in the supernal between her sinking and her return," Atlanta explained.

"Maybe too much more Truth than was good for her soul. Whatever the reason, she's madder than a hatter on a bad day." Albacore took up.

Atlanta jumped suddenly, as if remembering something. "Oh! Er, I'm a Natural Born too." She took a deep breath, then bowed, smooth as if practiced. " _Hajimemashite_ , Alice Margaret Lindt _desu. Douzo yoroshiku_."

Ayaka bowed back and returned the greeting. "Your pronunciation's quite good! Have you been studying long?"

Atlanta… No, Alice beamed at the compliment. "Thank you! I…" She blushed, embarrassed. "Not really. I started because I wanted to get more out of my anime. I'm aiming to get my N4 this year, er, if our operational schedule allows it."

Ayaka giggled. "I'll see what I can do to help. But… that surname?"

"Oh yes! We're related to the original himself, before it got bought over and made into what it is today. My folks still work there. If you need any chocolate, I can get you some at a discount."

Ayaka almost literally sparkled at that. "Great! I-"

There was a sudden growling sound, and Ayaka jumped.

She instinctually started summoning her rigging, but noticed that the others were not reacting as if there was any danger, instead trying to hold back laughter with varying degrees of obviousness.

There was another growl, under her, and Ayaka finally realised that it was her stomach. She promptly blushed very scarlet and tried to shrink in on herself and hide her face behind her mother's… no, her hat.

After the laughter subsided, Alice said, "Don't worry, I was ravenous after my Reawakening and the subsequent battle too. That's why we're headed to the wardroom for chow."

Off they went.

{Kimi no Na Wa./your name. Original Soundtrack - Cafe at Last}

Spotify track/583GEw6H1tNHas1lhJtWak

Ayaka figured there were only so many ways one could design a meal line, because whatever Uileag's talk of officer(-in-training) country, it didn't look much different from what they usually looked like.

There was a coat rack by the door, and seeing Quincy hang up her garrison cap, Ayaka followed suit. That done, she followed as the others secured a table before heading to the queue.

A closer look forced her to eat her words.

Chicken, fish and steaks. Noodles, pasta and rice. Vegetables more appealing than a few nearly-expired salad leaves or boiled broccoli. Bread, buns, cakes, pastries and pies of all sorts. Coffee, tea, milk, a soda fountain. Even a well-stocked freezer of ice cream.

It wasn't a restaurant-grade buffet, but it was much, much better than what she had been expecting. She started collecting food, then, at the urging of Gonzalez who had piled their plates high, haltingly added a bit more. There were a few enigmatic smiles at that, but Ayaka couldn't figure out what was being communicated there.

Last, Ayaka went for the coffee.

As the mug reached half full, Ayaka was already starting to have doubts. What had come out of the carafe was some black sludge that was attempting to pass for coffee, but no amount of sugar and creamer was helping it to camouflage… Whatever its true nature really was.

She brought her food back to the table with the others, then raised the mug once more to look at it.

It still looked like a Bad Idea.

Ayaka looked back at the others. Alice, sat behind a rather large pile that her petite frame didn't look capable of downing, was looking very nervous and her head was twitching in a way that might have been a subtle shaking, but none of the others seemed to share their concerns.

Haltingly, Ayaka raised the mug to her lips and took a sip.

She immediately regretted it.

One long bout of coughing later, she finally managed to utter, { _Kami,_ what the hell was that?}

Alice offered an apologetic smile and slipped into halting Japanese. {Navy food mostly good, but coffee suck long one. _Zenzen dame desu.}_ "Er, did that come out right?"

"Not quite, but I got what you meant," Ayaka said, giggling again. {Horrible, yes?}

"Yes. Looks like I really need your help... I learned the hard way too. I usually wait to make my own. Do you want me to make you some later?"

"May-maybe tomorrow. I've more of a sweet tooth anyway, so it's a good thing there's all that pastry. Will there be anything else tonight?"

Saratoga looked up from the food she was laying into. Ayaka was briefly filled with envy at how she made shoveling food into her mouth like a starving pauper at a buffet look elegant. The shipgirl in question took a moment to swallow before she accidentally let something fly while speaking. "I doubt it, not for you at least, but we'll probably need you to stick around tomorrow at least to finish the debrief and do recruitment procedures. Did you have something on?"

Next week, yes, but tomorrow… "No, but I'll need to tell my boss."

"Oh, okay."

Ayaka hesitantly regarded the mug still in her hands. "Does anyone want this? I don't think any amount of sugar and creamer will salvage this."

Quincy accepted it and gulped it down in one move.

After she finished her food, including the replacement drink and dessert, Ayaka still felt hungry, but she hesitated, unsure as to whether she could-

"It's fine to take more!" said Saratoga, who had noticed her hesitation while in the midst of rising from the table to put word to deed. So Ayaka followed suit.

After she had finally had her fill, Ayaka let out a contented sigh-

And her cutlery clattered to the plate as her brain caught up with her stomach on how much she had eaten. "I-I-" she grew steadily more appalled as she mentally tallied the amount of food she had introduced into the newborn black hole that her stomach had apparently become. It did not help that her imagination was visualising how many plates, bowls and mugs would have been needed had she made like a proper civilian buffet and got new crockery for every serving.

"I think… what's she called again? is not responding. Hey Lanty, where's the CTRL+ALT+DELETE on a November Bravo?"

"Albacore, don't be rude," Saratoga chided.

They patiently waited for Ayaka to recover, which she eventually did. The first words out of her mouth afterwards were a horrified "I ate all of that?!"

Alice patted her forearm reassuringly. "We all did. Well, okay, maybe subcapitals like Quincy, Albie and I don't eat as much as capships like you, Sara or Wash, but we still put away a lot more than a person our size should be able to. Still nowhere near how much our historical crews should need, though."

"This is going to be murder on my food budget, though," Ayaka muttered nevertheless.

"Well, the good news is that we only need to down so much when we come back from using our rigging and need to resupply. Otherwise we just eat not so much more than a normal human," Alice said.

"Resupply? As in, food goes in and it actually fills up my fuel and ammo stores?"

"Yep."

"Well, you can just eat bullets and drink oil directly if you want," Saratoga said. "It's supposed to be more efficient."

"Ugh." Albacore winced, preempting Ayaka's thoughts on that.

"Try not to bite too hard on cutlery either," Alice said. "I accidentally ate a few forks the first few days after I Reawakened. Doesn't do the steel stores much good compared to eating STS."

"Aluminium foil is not a good substitute for aviation-grade aluminium either," Saratoga added. At Ayaka's tilted head, she said,"Experience." Her cheeks coloured.

After returning their crockery, Ayaka asked, "What now? Do we-"

That was when a loud, sustained yawn escaped her.

"Don't worry, my Reawakening was exhausting too," Alice said reassuringly.

After a dainty chuckle, Saratoga said, "I'll show you to the capital ship dorm. We still have plenty of unoccupied bunks, so you can borrow one. You don't have a change of clothes, do you?"

"No, I don't," Ayaka said after she stopped hiding her face again.

"That's fine! We're…" Saratoga looked her over. "More or less the same size, so I can spare you a set."

"I don't want to impose."

"No, really, it's fine! Come on!" Saratoga turned back briefly to the rest of Gonzalez. "Girls, you go ahead to the office and start your reports. I'll take Ayaka here and-"

"Tuck her in and kiss her goodnight?" Albacore suggested helpfully, face with a mouth that wouldn't melt butter, which only got unamused stares from Ayaka and Saratoga.

"-show her to the dorms first," Saratoga finished. "Run along now."

As the rest of the team complied, Saratoga sighed even as she started walking off.

"Does that happen a lot?" Ayaka asked, keeping up easily.

"The girls being childish? An awful lot. Some days I feel more like a babysitter than a flagship."

"Sounds tough."

"Atlanta's a good girl - most of the time anyway - and Washington doesn't need any looking after, but the other three…" she shook her head.

The dorm wasn't much to look at either. After pointing out the bunk that would hold her for the night, Saratoga made a beeline for her wardrobe and started picking through it, then paused and turned to Ayaka. "How about you pick? You'll be the one wearing it after all." While Ayaka was choosing, Saratoga found a bag for her existing clothes. "You can keep your current clothes in here. I don't think you have a bag for them, do you?"

"Ah, I couldn't accept. It's enough that you're lending me a set of yours."

"No, no, it's fine!"

Once that was done, Saratoga gathered toiletries and showed Ayaka to the showers.

"I'll need to… Finish up with the statement, was it? Tomorrow? What time do I need to be up?"

Saratoga looked thoughtful for a bit. "I'll have to check with CAPT Cecil. Don't worry, someone will come to wake you when it's time. Please, just turn off your alarm clock and sleep as much as you need. Night!"

After the shower and other necessary functions, Ayaka fired off messages to her boss, family and Uileag, then went to bed. Sleep claimed her quickly.

Her dreams were filled with typhoons raining snakes, explosions, and visions of realities where her mother had not died young.

===[===]===

Next time on _Kimi no Na Iowa:_

===[===]===

"Good morning. Please mind your head."

===[===]===

Ayaka felt small shudders as they firmly took hold of the rigging.

===[===]===

"Safe? Of course you're not safe!"

===[===]===

Ayaka subtly edged away from the madgirl.

===[===]===

"It's glorious!" She spat. "Fucking electronic old men."

===[===]===

It looked like a hexagon from afar, but closer inspection revealed that it was really a thick band that wound over and under itself without breaking to create that shape, vaguely like a Moebius strip. The triangular space in the middle contained a set of bars and a Y-shaped thing parallel to the left side.

===[===]===

Authors' notes: Okay, maybe not all that cute…


	8. Chapter 7

===[===]===

CHAPTER SEVEN

===[===]===

The next day

===[===]===

"Good morning," someone said. "Please mind your head."

Ayaka stirred at the voice and rubbed her face. "Eh?" It was light out and the surroundings were unfamiliar. Mindful of the warning, she rose slowly, careful not to hit her head on the underside of the… bunk? Overhead. Hesitantly, she peeked through the privacy curtain.

There was a very tall brunette smiling down at her.

Her sleep-addled mind kicked itself back into action, the events of the previous day flooding back into awareness. All that stuff about being a reincarnated warship, moving on water… seeing her mother again… none of that had been a particularly vivid and wonky dream?

"No, I'm not a delusion," Other Her said, sounding more amused than annoyed.

"That's what a delusion would say," Ayaka mentally rebutted. Out loud, she said, "Ah! I overslept?"

Saratoga… Yes, that was Saratoga… said, "No, no! I was serious when I said it was fine to sleep until one of us called you." As Ayaka got to her feet, she continued, "I'll take you to the mess after you're done in the toilet. Atlanta will take you to see our CO after that."

After breakfast, where Ayaka blessedly did not end up eating as much as at the previous night's dinner, Alice led the way to a door with a nameplate that stated "CO AMALGAM FIVE" and knocked on it. "LT Lindt and VIP to see the captain."

Despite curtailing the urge to use her radar to peek, Ayaka could faintly make out a sound or two within, and since ground-penetrating radar was a thing, she wondered for a moment if she could do the same here.

There was a vague impression from Other Her of not knowing. Something about things having gone horribly wrong if she had ever gotten near enough to an unknown structure to radiate into it.

Before she could ask Alice, though, the door swung open and a woman wearing wings and the silver eagle of a US Navy captain emerged. She looked at Alice, craned her neck up to regard Ayaka, blinked, then looked back at Alice. "Thank you, Alice. I'll call when we're done. Dismissed."

"Yes, Ma'am." Alice saluted, which was returned, and with a reassuring pat of Ayaka's arm she made herself scarce.

"Come in!"

{Deus Ex Original Soundtrack - UNATCO}

YouTube watch?v=nBPK_oXeJgA

CAPT Cecil's office looked tidy enough on first glance, but the precarious piles of documents and folders told a different story. It was the scrupulous neat of someone who compulsively kept an unrelenting tide under control rather than the easy emptiness of someone who hadn't anything to do or was well ahead of the curve.

Ayaka stepped slowly into the room, careful not to bump into anything, and stopped before the desk, stiffly standing at attention and giving a salute as best as she remembered. "Ma'am, USS Iowa reports as ordered." She hoped her voice didn't betray any of her nervousness.

"At ease, miss… do you prefer Ms Godai or Ms Shirokaze?" Cecil asked while returning it.

"Either is fine, Ma'am." Ayaka wasn't exactly surprised by the question; both her surnames were on public record, after all. "Whichever is easier to say."

"Godai, then?"

Ayaka nodded assent.

Cecil collapsed into her chair and waved at those in front of the desk. "Sit, sit! This isn't RTC Great Lakes. Don't stand on ceremony."

Ayaka nodded carefully and pulled one out, settled into it, then looked towards and started reaching for the height adjuster before remembering where she was and deciding against it.

"No, no, go ahead!" Cecil chuckled. "Don't worry, Sara has the same problem."

Well, that made sense. They were the same height. Ayaka fiddled with the lever until the seat was as high as it could go, then sat back on. It still wasn't perfect, but it was better.

"Sorry about that. I keep thinking I should get Vulcan to work some magic on the chairs so they can accommodate the taller girls, but she has enough to do without wasting time on such trivialities. Anyway, firstly, I would like to apologise on behalf of the navy about O'Bannon's atrocious behaviour. She has been detained and will be punished."

"Yes, Ma'am," Ayaka said, a note of weariness not entirely inadvertently slipping into her voice.

Fortunately, Cecil seemed to catch it, because she said no more on the subject, instead pointing behind Ayaka. "Please wait a moment. We're trying to get either Admiral Nagara or Admiral Adams."

Ayaka turned to face a large wall-mounted widescreen television currently displaying "Awaiting signal."

Cecil stifled a cough. "I'm afraid we might have to wait. It's been a hectic night."

"Yes, Ma'am. I can imagine."

"In the meantime, would you mind providing more details on what happened last night? I've read your contemporaneous statement, and the girls have done their reports, but as the first on the scene, there are more questions I would like to ask you."

"Of course, of course."

"Let me just confirm some of your details please. Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai, alias Ayaka Shirokaze… just like that, no middle names?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Right. Maternal grandmother is Ichiyo Shirokaze, other grandparents deceased. Father is Yoshimichi Shirokaze né Godai, mother deceased. Sister is Kagami Lea Cuatha Godai Kagami Shirokaze. All correct? No middle names in the alias either?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Alright. Firstly…"

Partway through, there was a series of beeps. Ayaka turned back to the screen in time to see the text change to "Incoming transmission" and a progress bar, which gave way first to the seal of the Department of the Navy, then the command emblem.

The command's emblem was simultaneously simple yet complex, if that made any sense. It looked like a hexagon from afar, but closer inspection revealed that it was really a thick band that wound over and under itself without breaking to create that shape, vaguely like a Moebius strip. The triangular space in the middle contained a set of bars and a Y-shaped thing parallel to the left side.

The emblem in turn disappeared to show a older man in Service Khakis that had seen better days. Greying of hair, wearing ovoid spectacles, his craggy, wrinkled features had a slight bronze or olive to them that suggested Hispanic or Mediterranean heritage. A subtitle showed "RADM Jefferson Adams, DCOMNAVENSCIWARCOM".

{Battlestar Galactica Original Soundtrack - Baltar Speaks With Adama}

YouTube watch?v=3hStlVz8UBQ

Ayaka blinked, then hurried to her feet. Cecil too rose, albeit at a more measured pace.

"As you were, miss…" His soft yet steel-lined, gravely voice trailed off as he turned his gaze to Cecil and raised an eyebrow. "Which are we going with, Artemis?"

"Godai, Sir."

"Very well." He turned back to Ayaka, who was still looking nervously between the two officers like she was caught between a rock and a hard place. "Please sit, Ms Godai."

So prompted, Cecil returned to her seat; after a bit more indecision, Ayaka wheeled the chair to the side so she could see both of them, then angled it more towards Adams before lowering her rump too.

"Good morning, Ms Godai. I am Rear Admiral Jefferson Adams, Deputy Commander, United States Naval Enlightened Science Warfare Command. We are the component of the US Navy that is responsible for command, coordination, oversight and research of exotic and extradimensional elements. Simply put, the Department of the Navy is collaborating with BERND after the emergence of abyssals and shipgirls to better understand and implement esoteric elements in the service of the nation."

It was a bit of a mouthful, so Ayaka just nodded along dutifully.

"On behalf of our commander, VADM Hippolyta Nagara, I would like to welcome you back and offer our sincere apologies for O'Bannon's unacceptable behaviour. She will be punished firmly for it."

"Yes, Sir."

"I will be blunt with you. We need your help. As it currently stands, the US is the only nation of the extradimensional entity combat project Task Force VALKYRIE in any position to offer substantial aid to our allies. Japan is too busy keeping its own head above water with its comparatively limited natural resources, and the UK is not much better despite help from Canada, France and Germany on the Atlantic front. China and Russia, like us, have large enough hinterlands to feed their people, but not the spare capacity to regularly do blue water operations in aid of others. The nations bordering the Mediterranean are still trying to keep that theatre under control. The less said about anyone else with returnees from World War 2, the better.

"That leaves us. I know there are those who argue that we should not be helping others if we cannot get our own affairs in order, voices that will surely grow more strident in the wake of yesterday's attack.

"We disagree. We cannot, must not, will not abandon our allies in their time of need. We cannot do that, however, if we do not have all hands on deck.

"Will you help us?"

Ayaka would be lying if she said she didn't hesitate, a motion that did not go unnoticed.

"Legally, Ms Godai, we can force you to join us under the terms of the limited draft. Practically…" Adams frowned. "We would rather not use the stick."

Cecil and Ayaka winced at the unintended pun. Adams's lips might have twitched.

"Not just because subduing a noncompliant shipgirl with conventional forces is an ugly business, as I believe you're aware. Much as Congress and certain members of the old guard want every shipgirl to be another gun out on the frontlines, SecNav recognises that not all Natural Borns are eager to enter combat. If you so prefer, we can have you assigned to Iteration instead to help advance our understanding and application of supernal principles."

Did she want to take this out? Ayaka wasn't sure. On the one hand, she was afraid of getting hurt or dying, even if it no longer was a permanent cessation of existence. On the other… she didn't know whether it was a prompting from Other Her or her own sense of responsibility, but she couldn't just sit this out or run away.

"I understand you might not be ready to answer that question yet. That's fine. All shipgirls have to go through a 1-month accelerated training programme before we deploy you to the front; you can wait till it's over before you make a more informed decision."

"Thank you, Sir."

"You will be inducted as an midshipman for the duration of the training, then brevetted to lieutenant commander with the other capital ships, time to confirmation subject to performance. Pay and other privileges will be commensurate to your rank. You will get full hazard pay and an outsize food allowance; we trust you will not abuse it." Another twitch of his lips.

"No, Sir."

"As to your future posting, we tentatively have you slated for service on the Pacific front, which primarily falls to us and the Japanese to cover, unlike the Atlantic. Exact assignment remains to be determined; for opsec reasons, we cannot provide any further details right now, even if we already had something firmed up. I trust you understand?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Very good. Report back here next Sunday. You'll have the rest of this week and the next to tidy up your affairs before joining us. We're not savages; we know everyone has things to clear and affairs to settle first."

Adams turned to Cecil. "CAPT Cecil will handle the details, including the paperwork you'll need to present to your boss invoking the limited draft. It's Orion, isn't he?"

"Yes, Sir, Ms Godai's current boss is indeed Orion," Cecil fielded without missing a beat at the non-sequitur.

Ayaka could have sworn a tiny fond smile crept back onto Adams's face at that, but she herself was confused. "Orion, Sir?"

"Your current boss is Charles S Jordan, right?"

Ayaka blinked. She knew the background check would have been thorough, but she hadn't quite been expecting that query. "Yes, Sir."

"Then that's who we mean. Ask Artemis if you have any further queries."

"Affirmative."

"We're glad to have you with us at last, and hopefully the rest of your sisters will be along shortly.

"Artemis, find Paul if you need anything."

"Yes, Sir."

"Adams out."

The picture winked out and was replaced with a "transmission lost".

"Sorry. I should properly introduce myself too," Cecil said, and Ayaka turned back to her. "CAPT Lyra Cecil, call sign 'Artemis'. Commanding officer, Amalgam Five, Construct Nine, NAVENSCIWARCOM, otherwise known as Task Group 183.9.5 or Gonzalez Team. My pleasure to meet you, Ms Godai."

"The same, Ma'am."

"Shall we finish taking the statement first?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

After they finished doing so, Cecil said, "Give me a moment to dig out the recruitment forms. I'm sure they're around here somewhere, but we haven't had many nearby Manifestations or Natural Borns recently, so we haven't had too much use for them. Feel free to ask any questions while I'm about it." Cecil began rummaging through the piles.

"Alright. What does the command's name mean? Why 'enlightened science'?"

Cecil laughed from behind the pile. "Ah, yes. We need to make fillips to the electronic old men running the world, or thinking they're doing so, from Capitol Hill or the Pentagon. Many of them haven't quite gotten the message that it's a new age."

"Even with all this proof?"

Cecil looked up to offer a small, apologetic smile before diving back into her search. "You'd be surprised how many people, not just the old guard, think that if you disbelieve all this hard enough, it will all disappear in a puff of logic when reality corrects itself to their wishes.

"Before the shipgirls and abyssals appeared, belief in the supernatural was declining. Yes, there were still strong religious blocs, but it's an open question as to how many paid more than lip service to the idea of there actually being a spiritual dimension to life. Hence the term 'enlightened science' - a thin coating of technobabble to make things more palatable to the unbelievers."

Ayaka winced internally, even as she had the strangest feeling Cecil had taken a bit too much delight in the explanation. She hadn't frankly given it too much thought, but so prompted, she was starting to wonder. Before Fafnir, it was clear even to herself that she had been phoning it in, carrying out her shrine duties only because she was obligated to rather than out of any genuine devotion to the Shinto faith. Had that remained true in the years afterwards, even after Gran had had her go through the process of getting ordained as a priestess? Was it still true now that she herself was living evidence of the supernatural?

Outwardly, she merely nodded. "Will I need to go through a public meet-and-greet, press conference or some other PR session?"

"No, that won't be necessary." Cecil rose from behind the piles again, a raised eyebrow betraying her confusion. "Why?"

"I…" An odd image surfaced in Ayaka's mind and she gave voice to it promptly. "Somehow, I thought the… the brass? Is that the term? That they might want to get us in front of a camera, show that we're safe, we're not monsters or something."

Cecil paused mid-search, going very, very still.

"Ma'am?" Ayaka asked when Cecil didn't move a muscle for a minute.

"Safe?" Cecil hissed abruptly.

"M-Ma'am?"

"Safe?" Cecil rose to her feet, plodding and implacable like Bagger 288, boiling with fury so great Ayaka didn't need magic to feel it. "Safe? Of course you're not safe! You lot are warships, but that doesn't mean you're some freak show act to be brought before a gawking audience and paraded like a doll or trophy! You are not property! You are not a machine! You are not a monster! You! Are! A! Person!"

Ayaka shrank in on herself, trying to hide behind the desk from the raging storm that the previously mellow captain had become.

Cecil slashed her arm out to the side, narrowly missing a pile. "Fuck anyone who says otherwise, and Admiral Nagara will bring the nailed bat!"

A silence followed that felt very long, but Ayaka knew was only about 5 minutes.

Cecil abruptly shook herself, as if coming out of a trance, and slowly lowered the arm. "I'm sorry. I'm very sorry about that." Her voice was noticeably subdued. "I don't know what came over me just now."

"It's-it's fine, Ma'am," Ayaka said, frantically trying to think of a safer topic to divert to. "Who or what is this Bernard?"

"BERND? That's the the Bureau of Enlightened Science Research and Defence." Cecil returned to her searching, still trembling slightly with rage that had yet to subside.

"The what?"

"It goes back to World War Two. Fortunately, it's been declassified, so I can tell you right now rather than wait for your clearance. Do you know anything about Nazi occultism?"

"Not really, no. I think…" Ayaka cast her mind back, trying to recollect. A memory emerged of something she hadn't been paying too much attention to of her school days back in Imamura, a classmate talking about… " _Wolfenstein_? That's all I really know about it. Not the super old one, but a slightly less antique one."

" _Return to Castle Wolfenstein_?"

"I'm not sure," Ayaka sheepishly admitted. "I'm not a serious gamer."

"Ah, that's not important. Anyway, during the final days of the fighting in the European theatre, the army encountered camps involved in human experimentation. What took that beyond just Mengele's handiwork, though, was the presence of strange red crystals of unknown composition and books in an unknown language. Whatever the crystals were, the findings showed that skin contact ended… poorly. You don't want to look at the photos on a full stomach." Cecil winced behind the piles, forgetting that Ayaka couldn't see her. "That said, they also released unknown energies, which is why they weren't just disposed of outright. The Library of Congress didn't have any success with the texts either, but their Professor Ralph Besen mooted and was given approval to spin off an organisation dedicated to studying extradimensional phenomena, starting with that."

"That's how BERND started?"

"That it is."

"Did anything ever come of those crystals and texts?"

"I-I don't know, actually."

"Oh."

After some more waiting, another thought came to mind. "Ma'am? If I might ask, why is a captain commanding a... six-man fireteam? Isn't this way below your paygrade?"

Cecil chuckled. "You're not the first to ask that, and most likely not the last. If it were a conventional human fireteam, it would indeed be a junior NCO's assignment. The shipgirls are merely the combat arm of the amalgam, which includes the support unit as well. From another perspective, though, consider the team composition, taking Gonzalez as an example. Can you tell me something about it?"

Ayaka didn't have to rack her brains much. "Saratoga, a carrier. Washington, a battleship. Quincy, heavy cruiser. Atlanta, light cruiser. O'Bannon, a destroyer, and Albacore, a submarine. That's…" it dawned on her. "A carrier battle group."

"Exactly. Under normal circumstances, a steel hull force with that composition would be a flag officer's command. Shipgirls have been a nightmare for the command structure. There was a lot of disagreement early on between the surface warfare community and NAVSPECWARCOM about whether to follow the ship or infantry organisational structure. Eventually, BERND suggested a third option that SecNav accepted, hence our unusual naming.

"From a visible warm bodies perspective, you are absolutely right. An amalgam is a fireteam. Even from a logistical point of view, I think you know now that you're consuming nowhere near as much as either your old body or the sailors on board would have needed." She gestured over the piles at Ayaka, who had caught on.

"From a firepower perspective, a shipgirl, er, amalgam is a CVBG by itself, and therefore way above a junior NCO's paygrade."

"Well, not all of them. As quick reaction forces, Coyote, Gonzalez, Roadrunner and the other Quick Reaction Amalgams aren't standard. Going to the West Coast constructs… if you're getting assigned to a Heavy Escort Amalgam, that'll follow similar lines. Most of the rest of our units are organised by the old ship type. That said, you're right. Even a DesDiv is greater responsibility than a petty officer is supposed to command." With a triumphant flourish, Cecil pulled out a set of forms. "Ah, there you are." She handed them over to Ayaka along with a pen. "Here are the forms. Don't worry about the photos; you had some taken at the security office, right?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"We'll use those then." She was left to fill in the forms while Cecil went back to her work.

Ayaka encountered the part of the form which required applicants to declare whether they had relatives working at any level of government and paused. Her father had taken to city politicking like a duck to water, even if he now tried to make up for lost time whenever possible. It was obvious to put his name down. Uileag, though…

"Ma'am?"

"Yes, Ms Godai?"

"My boyfriend's with the CEC. Does that count?"

"Ensign Greer, was it, one of the Heroes of Hueneme? I think you'd better put it down." Frowning in thought, Cecil preempted Ayaka's next question. "Before you ask, no, you'll be in different chains of command, so your relationship won't be forbidden by the fraternisation regs."

"I-why, yes, that was exactly what I was going to ask next," Ayaka said, surprised.

"Well, I can't remember offhand whether we've had any other Natural Borns who already had serving boyfriends or husbands, but odds are good that something similar should have happened before or will in future."

"Point taken, Ma'am."

The forms were completed without further incident, and Ayaka handed them back.

"Alright, thank you. Now, I believe Vulcan will want to have a word with you too before we let you go home. About your rigging and outfit, I believe. I've called Alice to take you to engineering."

"Vulcan…" Ayaka scanned both her memories. "The repair ship?"

"The same. She's the head of our branch of Iteration. She'll explain that when you meet her. After that, you should be free to go home. Details, packing list, the documents for your company and such are in there. Please remember to come back next Sunday. We really don't want to have to hunt you down." Cecil chuckled, taking the sting out of the words.

"Yes, Ma'am," Ayaka said, but her matching laugh was less enthusiastic.

"One last thing before you go. Tell Orion that Artemis still owes him a hurricane and plans on delivering sometime next month."

"Eh? Pardon, Ma'am?"

Cecil grinned. "Tell him that when you give him the papers. He'll know what I mean."

Ayaka gave another confused, uneasy look, but nodded assent anyway. "Yes, Ma'am. Actually, I have a last query of my own."

"Shoot."

"Do I need to hide the fact that I'm actually a Natural Born shipgirl from the people around me? I know the SEALs and other special forces types do."

Cecil frowned. "That has been one of the sticking points our friends in NAVSPECWARCOM have about us. There is, officially, nothing that says November Bravos need to hide their faces. Unofficially, we would prefer if you keep it only to people you can trust not to be stupid and resist the urge to go 'lol ROFL imma bote 4 realsies' on Twitter or Facebook or… God, I don't know what new social media platform the kids are playing with nowadays."

Ayaka shared her wince. "I have no interest in doing that, Ma'am."

"Small mercies. I don't want to criticise what our allies do, but…" Cecil made "I'm trying to think of how to put this" gestures. "Off the record, I don't understand why and the JMSDF and their _Kaishou_ what's-his-name are open to if not outright encouraging their shipgirls to make celebrities of themselves, like that Maya dragging Atlanta and Charybdis into game livestreams. It goes against every soldierly instinct I have, and even I know some of the old guard see us as mavericks, what with shipgirls not being subject to uniform regulations and the like."

Ayaka nodded. "Okay, thank you, Ma'am. No further questions."

"No, thank you. I look forward to working with you in future somehow."

Alice was at the door to retrieve her, and off they went to the engineering section where Vulcan was stationed.

"So, how is it? Will you be staying after the RTC period?"

Ayaka shook her head. "I'm afraid not. Admiral Adams says I'm wanted over on the Pacific front."

"Aw…" Alice was undeniably disappointed.

"Maybe it's for the best I don't try helping you with your Japanese, not in the long run," Ayaka tried to say consolingly. "My ancestors were from somewhere in Gifu. I might accidentally slip in all sorts of provincial slang, and then by the time I'm through with you, any Edokko would identify you as a hick faster than a sprinting Skyranger. Then they'd be confused as to what a _gaijin_ is doing speaking hillbilly Japanese…"

"What a shame… but it wasn't just about the Japanese lessons, as nice to have as that would have been. No offence to Wash," and here Alice coloured at talking about her comrade behind her back, "but her flank of 27 is considerably slower than the rest of us, and it would have been nice to not have to deliberately down throttle so she doesn't get left behind without Stepping."

"Oh."

"Well, maybe after studying your rigging, Vulcan or Dr Sheng or someone else in NAVENSCIWARCOM will be able to come up with some hypertech that lets Wash do 30+. Who knows?"

Ayaka stopped short. "They can do that?"

"Well, we're not so sure about swapping engines, but weapons-wise we're definitely like OmniMechs."

"Omni…?"

"Ah, sorry! _BattleTech_. Shipgirl weapons are plug and play and can be hot-swapped with ease we could only dream of in our old bodies. There's a lot of complicated fine-tunes Iteration hasn't figured out yet, like the Japanese grasp of optics we never bothered matching, but it turns out you can pull out a Japanese bootleg Hotchkiss and slap on a Bofors and radar and it works just fine. Don't ask me how."

"What about planes?" Ayaka suddenly found herself wondering. "Or should I be asking Saratoga that?"

"Mm, probably? I know, though, that her kids had a chance to test some of those late-war Japanese planes. They somehow knew what to do as soon as they got into the cockpits. It was uncanny, very _Matrix_ or _Ace Combat._ Maybe there's a way of upgrading boilers too?"

A thought floated to the surface of Ayaka's head. "Other Me wouldn't mind some better torpedo protection."

{XCOM 2 Original Soundtrack - Welcome to the Lab}

YouTube watch?v=we87CbQO1Mg

The first thing that greeted them on entering the engineering section was an antechamber with three doors set into the opposite wall. The yeoman driving a desk desperately tried to suppress a yawn and sit up straight as they passed through the entryway.

"Is this the right place?" Ayaka asked, suddenly nervous.

"Atlanta and Iowa?" The yeoman asked after peering at a form.

"That's us."

The yeoman nodded and walked over to the leftmost door and pressed a button on what looked like an intercom.

"Go for Vulcan," it crackled back after a while.

"Atlanta and Iowa to see you, Ma'am."

"Alright, alright, give me a moment."

A bit later, the said door buzzed and swung open.

By first impression, Ayaka wouldn't have pegged the shipgirl coming through the door as the Roman god of smithing she was named after. Vulcan had red hair she wore in a long ponytail and one red eye. A black eyepatch, so big it was almost a half-facemask, covered much of the right side of her sharp face, including the eye on that side. She had a broken nose. She wore a white short-sleeved blouse, a yellow necktie and an aqua pinafore that had a large part of the side and back cut out for no reason Ayaka could discern. Black pantyhose and white shoes completed the outfit.

She went over to the centre door and tapped out a passcode, upon which it unlocked to admit them. Within was a large room filled with employees, a separate office at the end. Said office had cabinets and shelves aplenty, a messy desk with a computer monitor on it, a big safe, a second terminal to one side and a back window that offered a glimpse into some kind of antechamber.

"Alright. Thanks, Atlanta. I'll call you when we're done here."

Alice nodded and left the room, even as Vulcan invited Ayaka to sit at the desk.

"Welcome, mis-do you mind if I call you Iowa, or would you rather I stick to your surname?"

"Either is fine. I need to get used to people calling me by… my old name."

Vulcan shrugged. "Right. Coffee?" She pointed to a coffee machine at one side of the office.

"Is that…" Ayaka trailed off warily.

"Real coffee, not navy tar? Hahaha! No need to shrink like that, newbie!" And indeed Ayaka had curled up into a protective ball, having realised that her distaste for the thing the navy tried to pass for coffee might not have won her any friends. "I know the navy standard is not to everyone's taste, unlike some of the puritans who think it can do no wrong. Come on over!"

Ayaka accepted the invitation and helped herself to the right settings, and returned to her seat while it brewed.

"Welcome, as I was saying, to the JB MDL branch of Iteration. We're the division of NAVENSCIWARCOM that deals in the application, development and execution of hypertech. Well, we do all of it currently, but there's talk of splitting the biomedical and life sciences stuff into their own specialised division. Progeny or something like that. NAVSEA and the other systems commands go through us for their needs."

"Er."

"Yes?"

"What does that mean? Hypertech?"

"Oh, right! Sometimes I forget not everyone's clued in." Vulcan stretched her arms out and shook one hand. "See, on this end, you have conventional tech. Stuff you can get from any normal factory. Conforms to physics as we used to think it works."

She shook the other hand. "On the other end, you have… Magic." She looked conflicted. "Still feels weird saying that as anything other than in jest. As a repair ship in particular, I've always been one for technical talk, not hocus-pocus."

Ayaka snorted. "I wouldn't know. I might have been sceptical myself, but I did grow up being raised to be the next priestess of my family shrine. It wasn't that much of a leap for me to accept that there was truth to some of the legends." And that's not even getting into what happened 10 years ago, she didn't add aloud.

"Yep! So you see why we need that enlightened science thing? A spoonful of science helps the magic go down." Vulcan started as if suddenly reminded about something. "Ah. About that…"

"Hmm?"

"Do you think your grandmother would be interested in becoming a civilian consultant with BERND?"

Ayaka stared, caught off guard by the non sequitur. "My grandmother?"

"Yeah!" Vulcan nodded. "Yours was one of many religious lineages BERND was flagging for anomalies, not least due to your atypical heritage, even before the Cometfall or, well, yesterday's events. The JSDF has Shinto priests aplenty, but we would like more of our own for the different perspective, and there aren't…" she typed something into her computer.

"This all seems very ordinary," Ayaka remarked confusedly.

Vulcan looked back at her from the monitor. "Expecting something fancier?"

Ayaka nodded while gesturing around the office. "I was thinking holograms or something when you said magic. Some Tony Stark stuff."

"Nah." Vulcan chuckled. "Budget for the office equipment still sucks. I know some of the boys joke about churning out laser cannons to sell, but we're nowhere near that. You should see what we're doing down in the foundry after you get your full clearance, though. We're looking to see whether we can directly hook us shipgirls into the datalinks, rather than having to hold tablets that can be lost or fall from our hands in a storm. Or maybe some kind of augmented reality tactical visor if a direct upgrade of the CIC isn't possible? Anyway, where was I…"

A few moments of surfing later… "Yup, nearly nonexistent Shinto adherent population in our part of the world, and don't even talk about full priests and priestesses. We need all the inroads we can get."

"Gran's over 90 already. Are you even allowed to put her to work?"

Vulcan made a face. "I'd say details, but it probably isn't becoming of a repair ship like me to be so flippant. Let the lawyers and the HR over there work that out."

The coffee machine beeped, and Ayaka collected her cuppa. Fortunately, a cautious sip showed it was properly to her taste.

"Sorry. Where was I?" Vulcan asked once they were seated again.

"The other end was magic, I believe?"

"Ah, yes. So normal tech on one end, raw magic on the other. Hypertech is the bridge between the two, allowing mankind to reliably do things that have previously been considered the realm of fantasy or scifi.

"You see, magic is an individual art. Call us willworkers or call us enlightened scientists, working spells… Enlightened procedures… Whatever you call it, these things require individual focus. Even with multi-target or area-affecting powers, we still need to remain in the loop and can't just farm it out to a factory that can operate 24/7. Any idea what your favoured sphere is?"

Ayaka hesitated at the sudden switch in topic. "Time, I believe."

"Huh. Don't have a lot of those. We'll have to get…" Vulcan tried to think, then shook her head. "I'll have to go check who else knows this stuff at a level that can actually help. We'll work out what you can do during training.

"Anyway, as I was saying, magic is an individual effort, and that's not good enough. Oh, I know there are all kinds of crazy theories about what BERND calls mastery of the arts, something something imperial, something something Yamazaki-Millay Overclock, but we won World War Two on the strength of our industrial complex, not on the backs of an elite, exclusive cabal. Which…" Vulcan looked away, tapping the desk. "Is a bit hypocritical considering being a shipgirl makes me exactly one of those. Still...

"Drs Halen and Sheng are among the best in their fields, but… you said Tony Stark just now, right? Yeah, it would be nice if we had some omnidisciplinary supergenius of his calibre around." There was dreamy longing in her voice. "We've had to fumble in the dark, suffer through quite a few bum ideas. Some of the things we try to turn into reproducible reality… no catastrophic resonance cascades, but we get plushies of crying penguins and clouds appearing in the middle of the testing chamber for no obvious reason."

"Huh?" Ayaka blinked, unable to see the connection.

"None of us can figure it out either. God has a sense of humour, I guess." Vulcan stood up and began rummaging through a cabinet, before pulling out bags with what were presumably the toys in question.

"THEY'RE SO CUTE!" Ayaka squealed, leaping to her feet all a-sparkle… and then sat right back down, mortified, as she remembered where she was.

Vulcan only laughed as Ayaka hastily hid her burning cheeks behind her hands. "Don't worry, almost everyone else had that reaction too. Want a set? We're still working out what to do with the rather large amount of them we're piling up, but we can spare some for a token sum."

"Y-yes," Ayaka said, perhaps a little more eagerly than she was willing to admit.

"Right, here you go. We'll take it out of your salary. Just sign… here." Vulcan retrieved a form and presented it, which Ayaka read and acknowledged on. "Great! I'll get one of the boys to give you a set on the way out. Now, I was talking about difficulties with hypertech, I think?"

"You were."

"Yes. There're a lot of wants and not enough resources to go around. Can I conjure a brand new ship right out of thin air? Yes, but it takes so much out of me that the downtime afterward makes it not cost-effective, and I can say without arrogance that I'm pretty high-end as far as working with Matter is concerned. Some kind of industrial fabricator would be much better over time even if it doesn't have the raw burst output us shipgirls have. That's not even getting into issues of maintenance and reliability that are endemic to prototypes. Then, you have biomedical issues."

"What about them?" Ayaka asked, even as a twinge of fear hit her over what she might hear next.

"The same thing as with the material side. Too many wounded, not enough shipgirls strong enough in Life to heal them all. We've lost too many critical cases because healers can't be everywhere, and then there's FDA pricks making noise about indemnifying against 'experimental treatments' and thus limiting who we can help. I may be a crusty old mechanician who prefers high energy physics and predictable material science over messy organics, but even I can see we're doing good by the people. The amputated regain limbs, the blind see, the cancerous are cleared, the demented regain themselves… it's glorious!" Vulcan spat. "Fucking bureaucrats."

An image of Uileag, bedridden after his ordeal, entered Ayaka's mind, and she nodded grimly.

"Hypertech-wise, that's been a problem too. We've managed to come up with a fluid that can restore even a heavily-damaged capital shipgirl to brand new in around a day, but attempts to make it usable by normal people…" Vulcan winced. "It's a good thing we had healers on standby during the tests."

Ayaka desperately tried not to imagine what the failures looked like. Wordlessly, she noted that if this sort of testing was prone to horrific failure, some kind of regulatory watchdog was actually a good idea, though she wasn't stupid enough to say it to Vulcan's face.

"Yeah. So if we can't even reliably medicate, any bioaugmentation is a long way out. Anyway, your gear doesn't come with any fairy-forged melee weapons, does it?"

"Fairy-forged melee weapons?" Ayaka's confusion at the topic switch turned to horror. "C-CLOSE RANGE?!"

"Yes, close range." Vulcan grinned. "Heh. Sorry. Bad stereotypes of naginata-trained warrior women there. From your reaction, I'm guessing that's a no. In case Gonzalez hasn't told you yet, we're immune to anything below naval grade. Case in point." She pulled out a knife from a rack and, before Ayaka could say anything, slammed it into her other hand.

Ayaka violently flinched; she wasn't sure whether it was from what looked like self-harm in progress or the loud sound made by the blade snapping off on impact.

Vulcan raised the target hand and showed it off. "See? Not a scratch with a conventional knife." She picked up the broken blade, put it back together with its handle, and with a brief procedure joined the two back together into an intact weapon. She then walked over to a safe and unlocked it. Much more carefully, she took out and drew another knife. Outwardly, this one didn't look anything special.

To Ayaka's spiritual senses, it was different. Off-putting. Dangerous, even.

As if handling a baby, Vulcan took it in a hand and tenderly pressed the little finger of her other to the blade until a drop of… blood? Hydraulic fluid? Oil? welled up, after which she cleaned the weapon, put it away and walked over to a sink to wash the wound. "Fairy-made weapon. Stab a Ru or Ta where the heart or throat should be and it dies like a normal human."

Ayaka did her best to suppress a shiver. The casual, matter-of-fact way Vulcan had talked about fatally knifing something, even if the victim was an abyssal that didn't deserve any mercy, was a stark reminder that shipgirls, particularly the Summoned or Manifested, were reincarnated war machines first and humans second.

What did that say about herself now?

She found herself thinking back to her meeting with CAPT Cecil; despite the woman's vast displeasure at the idea, it was in retrospect easy to see why certain quarters might see shipgirls as objects of fear.

"Fortunately, there's some kind of… IFF, I guess you can call it, built in," Vulcan continued, unaware of Ayaka's inner turmoil. "Can't be turned against its original owner. Another thing that we're interested in replicating."

"What are fairies, anyway?" Ayaka found herself asking, perhaps in an attempt to keep her mind off grislier matters.

"Frankly? That's something we would like to know." Vulcan's eye turned to one side as she contemplatively rested her head on a hand. "We're aware they represent our crews from our previous life, but are they the actual souls, not truly sapient echoes and imprints they left by walking our passageways, or just unthinking automatons? Complicating the issue is that they can talk back and field queries, but some of them have gaps in their episodic memory despite otherwise being all there as far as technical skills are concerned."

She hung her head. "We're being circumspect with letting the public know more about fairies because the last thing we need is for some kid to freak because her dead grandpa came back but now has dementia or, perhaps worse, doesn't remember anything past his service on board the shipgirl in question."

Ayaka nodded grimly, distantly noting with bitter humour that she might as well have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire as far as pleasant topics of conversation were concerned. After a while, she started hesitantly toying with her hair. "Erm…"

"Got a question?" Vulcan asked.

"Yes. Why do abyssals need bases in our reality if they come from the supernal and can, theoretically, pop out almost anywhere in the seas?"

"Ah…" Vulcan thought for a few moments, then began accessing stuff on her computer. After a while, she shook her head. "Frankly, we're not too sure yet, but the leading theory is that it's got something to do with Infrastructure."

Something about the word gave Ayaka pause. Eventually, she said, "I could hear the capital I in that… I'm guessing you don't just mean docks, roads, electricity and water supplies?"

"Nooooot quite. You and I, we can downlink power from the supernal to reshape the world, right? Free, zero pollution Or energy for everyone?"

"Yes?"

"But there's only so much bandwidth, you could say, a shipgirl can use at any time. That's where capital-I Infrastructure comes in. It… think of it like a signal repeater. Which is…" Vulcan made a face, "probably a stupidly flawed analogy, if it's even accurate at all, but it sort of works. Infrastructure makes it easier to work with enlightened science and shield a place from intrusion. Like…" she made gestures with her hands, trying to come up with the right terms. "Any ideas?"

"Ley lines? Wards?"

"Something like that. We haven't seen any abyssals using magic, thank God, but we suspect that it makes crossing the veil easier. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence thus far that trying to summon shipgirls in bases that haven't had any stationed yet is harder and costlier."

"So, taking bases and… reconsecrating the grounds will slow the flow of abyssal intruders?"

"We believe so, yes."

"You and the command seem to have it all figured out, so why am I seeing you?" Ayaka asked. "CAPT Cecil said something about my rigging and outfit."

"Yes. Your rigging. There aren't many people alive left who know how to operate your old body, and I don't think the production lines for your parts even exist any more. There are a lot of things we could stand to relearn from it and your fairies, maybe implement them across the whole command. All that delicious, delicious institutional knowledge and lostech to regain. Mm-hm. Come to Mama. Aw yeah, baby, yeah," Vulcan purred dreamily.

Ayaka subtly pulled away from the mad shipgirl who looked one bad touch away from an orgasm. Or a divine revelation; she wasn't sure which.

Eventually, Vulcan came out of the trance. As if she hadn't zoned out there, she smoothly continued, "We're pulling everything out of mothballs, to Hell with cost. We might also be able to give upgrades to the other girls. Guns are one thing, but engines and other things are still being studied."

"Oh yes." Trying not to give away any sign of her reaction, Ayaka asked, "Atlanta said something about weapons being modular?"

"Yes, for us it is."

"So how do I do this loaning out of my rigging?"

"You're up for it? Great!" Vulcan shot to her feet. "Follow me." She led the way out of the office to the door Ayaka had first seen her emerge from, then through it to the antechamber visible from Vulcan's office. Instead of heading down the ramp, Vulcan walked over to a large empty platform and entered something into a display; at the cue, the floor opened up and a gantry rose.

Ayaka looked from the newly-revealed mechanisms to Vulcan and back again, spotting a pair of foot shapes marked on the ground. "Do I stand there and summon my rigging?"

"Yes, please do."

Ayaka stepped into the shapes and, with a slight effort of will, the now-familiar weight of her rigging settled on her shoulders and waist.

"Great! Now, stand still while I get the machine ready to receive it." Vulcan input more commands into the device and arms came down from the gantry; Ayaka felt small shudders as they firmly took hold of the rigging. "Just command it to detach."

Ayaka did so; with inexplicable hisses like escaping steam, it came off. A thought struck her then. "You'll be needing my fairies too, right? I left them on board." She cast a nervous eye at the rigging hanging from the arms of the gantry.

"Yes, we do. Things will go a lot faster with trained, experienced personnel to learn from than if we had to reverse-engineer everything from the finished product alone." Vulcan tapped a few more things into the device and the gantry lowered into the floor once more; the continued machinery noises told Ayaka that it was still on the move, most likely to the foundry.

"Do you have any idea what your outfit looks like?" Vulcan asked as they walked back to her office. "For us Summons or Manifested, we come back in the outfits we want, but I know for you Natural Borns, your avatar usually appears to you in the attire they prefer. Do you remember what Other You wore?"

"Why, yes, I do."

"Great!" Once they were back inside, Vulcan held up a tablet and a drawing block. "Do you prefer digital or traditional? Or if you have no artistic talent, you can just dictate and we can iterate until I get it right."

Ayaka thought for a moment, then pointed at the tablet. "Why do this, anyway? Can't we just conjure clothes with… procedures?"

"It's more efficient if you have an existing template to register, such that it can be repaired alongside yourself, rather than having to waste mana remaking a new one every time."

"Oh."

After pointing out the functions, including fields to designate the intended materials, Vulcan gave Ayaka some time to get it done. On her part, Ayaka put down the outfit she had seen Other Her wearing the previous evening, somehow knowing what the right materials were.

"Sensible yet stylish. I like it," Vulcan said when it was presented to her.

Iowa preened just a little bit; outwardly, Ayaka merely said "Thank you" with a small smile.

"Though I was the impression that you would have gone with something more… bold." Vulcan waved her hands about. "Audacious. Show off your fuel capacity. Some kind of low cut corset. Maybe put Old Glory in there somewhere."

"Oh, come on," Ayaka muttered, a despairing look blossoming on her face alongside a steady reddening.

"Huh?"

"Quincy said something like that too." Ayaka's hand found its way onto her face.

"Quincy?" Vulcan's eyes widened to the size of saucers, surprise warring with dismay. "Quincy?! Geez! Shit. Damnit. Okay, never mind, moving on." She subjected the design to a few clarifications before making a satisfied grunt, and saying, "Alright, that's it for now. Remember to return the security pass on your way out."

There was a staffer at the door holding onto the plushies and Ayaka stuffed them into her bag with slightly indecent haste. Alice was waiting there too. After a detour to the mess hall for lunch, Ayaka was brought to the security office, and once she had returned the pass, she was home free for now.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Lo, thus was the laziest design of Vulcan's shipgirl conceived. There may be rewards for people who can guess the inspirations featured here.


	9. Chapter 8

Authors' Notes: Ugh. You would think big, powerful, magical moments like what we had in mind for this chapter would be easier, but this was like pulling teeth. It was one of those awful cases where we knew our main points very well, but actually turning them into long form text was a nightmare. Our apologies in advance for half-bakedness and meandering.

In other words, how do you write romance we can't even

Also, we find all the concern about the Americanisation of the live action remake funny. Then again, we didn't and aren't going to bother providing any explanation for an inexplicable Japanese hamlet in the US predating Perry, so...

===[===]===

CHAPTER EIGHT

===[===]===

{your name. Original Soundtrack - Goshintai}

Spotify track/7ewpQHhYDb2QDVMooQhPG4

There was hardly anyone on the new Shirokaze shrine's grounds when Ayaka stepped through the threshold after carrying out her purifications, fresh from her debriefings at JB MDL.

Frankly, Ayaka wasn't surprised, even taking into account that it was a weekday afternoon. She had known full well without Vulcan's questioning that there was a miniscule population of Shinto adherents in the USA. Back in the old days, Imamura had been sufficiently out of the way that visitors were nearly nonexistent; Eastern Seaboard practitioners would gladly go to Colorado or even Washington for the major festivals rather than go to the trouble of finding it. Now that it was more accessible, there was a bigger influx of devotees, especially on big days, but even between locals and native Japanese expatriates and tourists, there was still hardly any traffic on a day-to-day basis.

She followed the corridor past the lay caretaker to the employees-only area and let herself in, exchanging a few words of greeting with the handful of employees and volunteers.

Employees and volunteers. 10 years on, it still felt strange. The Ichiyo Shirokaze of the old days would never have stood for any outsiders serving in the shrine, even in a lay capacity, without ties by marriage as Yoshimichi had. Even then, Ayaka had learnt in the post-Cometfall therapy that father and grandmother had never really been on the best of terms even before Mom's death.

That was then.

Now? There had been, much to the surprise of the family, a nonzero number of practitioners wanting to serve formally with the shrine after getting ordained as _kannushi_ or at least take up apprenticeship en route to said ordainment. Did the increased visibility of the better location do that? Gran was still taking her time regarding the matter, but the fact that she hadn't immediately and unambiguously put the kibosh on the thing spoke volumes. Ayaka wondered what had brought on the change. Had the Cometfall finally shocked her out of her complacency regarding the shrine succession where Mom's death and Dad's dereliction had failed? Was it the creeping influence of the more cosmopolitan environs of NYC, unlike isolated Imamura where one could go days without seeing a person not of Japanese blood?

Further in was the head priestess' room. Contrasting the typical office setting outside, it looked like it had been taken right out of a traditional Japanese shrine, obvious modernity carefully concealed as best as possible.

Soothing in antiquity.

Setting down her bag, she started meditating while waiting for her grandmother to finish her own.

{I'm back, Gran,} she said once her grandmother was done.

{Ayaka! I'm glad you're o-o-o-} Ichiyo's surprised stutter trailed off, disbelief plain on her face.

{Gran? What's wrong?}

Ichiyo raised a trembling hand to point behind and slightly to Ayaka's side. {You're a shipgirl.}

{I-} Ayaka immediately looked behind her to check that she had not accidentally summoned her rigging at some point. No, she hadn't, and the lack of weight meant she hadn't done so but cloaked it from sight in the process, though she could still feel the thread connecting it to her where it was currently ensconced at JB MDL. Attenuated by something - the Infrastructure Vulcan had mentioned? - but definitely there.

Which meant…

{Gran, what do you see?}

Ichiyo gestured with her hands, roughly tracing the shape of what would have been Ayaka's rigging. {You're wearing an antique blue sailor dress and a ghostly big… backpack like a split ship's front with three turrets.}

{Bow,} she instinctively corrected. {But… how? I thought you told Uileag you couldn't actually see that it was him in me?}

{I did?} Confusion played over Ichiyo's face. {When did I ever-oh.} She nodded in realisation. {That explains that strange dream I had last night.}

{Eh? What dream?}

{I had one regarding 10 years ago, the months before Fafnir.}

Ayaka had a feeling she knew where this was going.

Ichiyo looked lost in thought. {You were being weird back then, and I was wondering if you were daydreaming or sleepwalking. When it stopped after the coming of Fafnir, though, I didn't think more of it, and it faded from my memory.} Her gaze refocused on Ayaka. {Then you brought that boy home last year.}

{Uileag?}

{Yes, him. He seemed familiar, though I had no idea then why. In hindsight, it adds up. It was him, wasn't he?}

{Who?}

{The one you were dreaming about.}

{Yes.}

{Except it wasn't a dream. You were living his life.}

{Yes, I was.}

Ichiyo nodded. {He's a good boy. The gods didn't make a mistake there.}

They sat in silence for a bit longer before Ayaka asked, {So, apart from seeing that I'm a shipgirl, do you know what else you can do?}

Ichiyo shook her head, still filled with wonder at the sight. {I didn't even know I could do that.}

{Curious.} Ayaka was contemplative. {I wonder… Could it have something to do with your prayers and meditations? Did you also Awaken as a,} Ayaka struggled for the right term, {sympathetic side effect of me doing so?}

{I don't know.} Ichiyo sighed. {If we still had our old documents and records, we might have been able to dig up something that could answer these questions and help you. As it is, between Mayugoro and Fafnir, there's nothing. It feels strange not having the answers.}

{That reminds me,} Ayaka said. {I was told that BERND might be interested in having you as a consultant.}

{BERND?} Ichiyo gave her a sharp look. {Those people studying the paranormal?}

{Yes. Vulcan said they need more Shinto experts.}

Ichiyo made a face like biting into a lemon. {It seems like I might need to take those apprenticeship requests a bit more seriously than I had been hoping to have to,} she reluctantly said after a while.

There was a knock at the door and Ayaka got up to get it, finding her father there. {Dad.}

{Ayaka! What happened?}

{Eh…} Ayaka looked back at her grandmother, who nodded solemnly, and took a deep breath. Best to get it out quick rather than beat around the bush. {I'm a shipgirl, freshly Reawakened last night. USS _Iowa_ reporting. Mom came back for me... she said to remind you that death is still not the end.}

There was a surprised exclamation behind her.

Eh? Had she forgotten to mention that?

{Nijimi… you saw Nijimi?} Yoshimichi asked.

{Yes. She was very sorry for not being able to be here for us.} Ayaka hung her head.

Yoshimichi tried to suppress a sudden shiver but didn't entirely succeed. As a politician, he knew very well what a liar looked like, not that his hopelessly guileless daughter could act to save her life, and Ayaka either was telling the truth or had bought into a delusion.

Much as he knew he had accused her of having the Shirokaze sickness before, right now her words were filled with a conviction despite their morose delivery that made him want to believe.

A healthy scepticism was necessary in his line of work, but right now he really, badly wanted to believe.

He walked over to and very definitely did not collapse into his seat. {You're going to have to go out and fight, then?}

{Yes. I-strictly speaking, I can choose to not be at the frontlines, help in the research instead, but I can't-I don't think it'd be right for me to refuse. Is it?} She asked.

Yoshimichi shook his head. {I'm the last person who has the right to talk about duty. I don't have the right to tell you what's the correct thing to do here.}

The three of them exchanged a look, which degenerated into a long silence.

It was one thing to rationally know that depression was at least in part the result of altered brain chemistry, that it was not a failing for want of willpower, and that no one asked to get or could suddenly, decisively snap out of it any more than with cancer or a cold.

That didn't make the scars it had left in Ayaka's life, in the time following her mother's death where she had needed her father to be there for the family the most, any easier to bear.

Having missing parents, it fucked you up inside, to be blunt. She knew that too well.

{Besides, you're a legal adult now,} Yoshimichi eventually said. {I can't stop you from doing what you want anymore.}

Ayaka nodded sombrely.

{I had a dream of you acting oddly last night,} Yoshimichi said contemplatively. {Did it have something to do with what happened?}

{Eh?}

{Body swapping, was it, with that boy?} He said, some of his usual gruffness returning to his voice. {I was wondering why I had such a strong reaction to seeing him for what should have been the first time.}

Ayaka started, paling as she realised what he was referring to. {I'm-I'm very sorry for that!} She started bowing frantically. {I'll get Uileag to apologise the next time he sees you!}

{Stop. Just stop.}

Ayaka froze mid-bow and slowly straightened up.

Yoshimichi shook his head. {No need to feel guilty on his behalf. It was so long ago; I don't have any lingering hard feelings. Just-whatever you choose, just… Please be careful. I-after losing Nijimi, I'm not sure what I'd do if I lost you too.}

{I'll-I will. I'll be fine, Dad.}

Yoshimichi nodded and shuffled haltingly to his office, Ayaka's eyes following his retreating form; as he made to shut the door behind him, she heard a faint sniffle.

{Will you be staying for dinner?} Ichiyo asked.

{Yes. Yes,} Ayaka repeated distantly as she took her eyes off the door.

Despite its being closed, her improved senses could still catch every last one of her father's heaving sobs.

===[===]===

April 21 2023

===[===]===

The next morning, Ayaka reported to Mr Jordan's office as soon as he arrived. The man waved her in and told her to take a seat while he settled his tall, lanky form into his own chair.

"So, what do you need to speak with me about?"

Ayaka handed over the papers from CAPT Cecil. "I'm being drafted into the navy, boss. Er, and Artemis says she plans on delivering that hurricane next month."

Surprise, confusion, doubt and amusement played over Jordan's face before he burst into booming laughter. "Oh, Lyra's finally delivering after all this while, is she? Tell me, does your drafting have anything to do with that… whassat skunkworks called that she can't tell me about much about? NAVENSCIWARCOM?"

How was she to answer that question? "If CAPT Cecil can't tell you herself, then I'm not sure I can either, boss."

"Hah! Well put. I know better than to probe." Jordan took a moment to skim through the documents. "This is the limited draft provision for personnel with specialised skills, since Congress hasn't managed to push through a general draft yet. Curious. Since you're reluctant to say, though, I shan't press the matter." He looked back up at her. "Scared? Nervous?"

{Spec Ops the Line Original Soundtrack - No Values}

YouTube watch?v=wMXE3fulO8g

Ayaka took a while to answer; Jordan let her. "Definitely," she eventually managed.

"I'd offer advice, but I haven't much to say." Jordan looked a bit abashed at that. "You don't fight a war for its own sake; it's continuation of diplomacy by other means."

"That sounds vaguely familiar." Ayaka couldn't place where from, though.

"Clausewitz. You need to have anchors, remember what you're fighting for, but don't take it too far; be it cause, country or family, the fanatic or true believer does what he does with the full approval of his conscience and considers nothing beyond the pale. Knowing where to stop is harder than it seems."

Ayaka stared at him, confused.

"Let me guess: You think that the lines are clear and you'll know better."

Ayaka nodded.

"Trust me, it's easy to say when you're safe far from the front. When you're in the thick of it, that's a different matter." Jordan looked down at his hands. "Peter swore up a blue streak that he wouldn't deny the Lord, and look where that got him." He looked back up. "I'm afraid I haven't a rule of thumb for you there. War changes you, Ayaka. Do they still feed your generation that gung-ho bullshit about making men of boys?"

Ayaka shook her head. "I wouldn't know. I was never the target audience."

Jordan tutted. "Take it from me; it rarely changes for the better." Slowly, deliberately, he raised a leg to rest it on his desk, rolled up the trouser leg to reveal a prosthetic and patted it. This wasn't the first time she had caught glimpses of it, but it was the first time he was purposely putting it out on display. "Wasn't around in the final stages of the Echo Oscar Tango, but I was still there for Dubai. I wasn't on the ground personally when we reinforced CAPT Walkure and his Delta boys, but I saw the faces of the fellows who came back, caught some of the helmet cam footage." He shivered visibly. "That stuff sticks with you. That was the worst I've ever seen, but that doesn't make any of the rest much better.

"Most people don't wake up and say they want to be the bad guy. You fight monsters long enough, though, sometimes you start believing that anything's acceptable if it means protecting you and yours from them." He took a deep breath. "Man, I can't believe I just unironically said 'your generation'. Lyra and I, we can't be that much your senior, are we?"

Ayaka tried to recall what she had seen of USN time in grade requirements. "Actually, boss, doesn't making captain need over 20 years?"

Jordan got a sour look on his face. "Guess I really am an old fogey. In one way I almost envy you."

"Huh?"

"Abyssals… those things out there, they're monsters plain and simple. Even their simulations of women wouldn't fool anyone who wasn't drunk. In training a lot of time was spent getting us to learn how to dehumanise our foes, make us think of them as a threat that must be eliminated rather than someone who has hopes and dreams and family he wants to go home to, however abhorrent or misguided the cause he serves. It doesn't always work, or at least it merely pushes the problem down the line. Seen too many friends lost to PTSD." Jordan sounded weary in a way that couldn't be just due to a sleepless night. "Easier when the enemy truly was never human to begin with."

Ayaka didn't know what to make of that. Had she herself ever been human, or merely a ghost of steel and fire possessing a human suit, unaware until late of its true nature?

Her turmoil must never have made it to her face, though, because Jordan never commented on it, merely saying instead, "So take care of yourself. I'll try and keep a space open if you want to come back when it's over."

"Thanks, boss. I appreciate the offer," Ayaka said anyway. Her eyes wandered over to a wall-mounted clock, and with a start, she said, "I think should get back to my work now."

"Yes, you probably should make sure the others know how to pick up the pieces when you're away," Jordan said with another booming laugh.

===[===]===

April 27

===[===]===

"Alright, I should go. Are we still on for tomorrow?" Ayaka's voice came through the phone.

"Yes, of course! I'll see you at the station at 7.00, then?"

"Sure! Night! I love you."

"I love you."

After Ayaka hung up, Uileag looked down at the item he had been clutching tightly to the point of pain in his left hand.

===[===]===

April 28

===[===]==

"I'm sorry I'm late, but I'm here at last."

Uileag turned in the direction of Ayaka's voice.

She was wearing an aqua dress with puffy short sleeves, a white sailor collar, a white underlayer and black gartered thighhighs.

"You look beautiful tonight. Colleagues wouldn't let you go?"

"Thank you. Yes, there was always one more thing they needed my help with, until I had to tear myself away." As they started walking, she added, "I don't know about you leaving your tie undone, though." She gestured at the item of clothing in question, before shifting her attention to the dark blue suit jacket and trousers he wore over a white button up and nodding in approval. "I have difficulty believing that between both your parents and two older sisters, you still had such atrocious taste in clothing before I entered your life. Er, re-entered?"

Uileag scratched the back of his neck. "Er… well, ath-Dadi never really had to worry about what to wear. All his sartorial requirements were prescribed to him back when he was on active duty, even his Full Dress kit."

Ayaka hid a frown at Uileag's slip of tongue.

 _The sleeper stirred, feeling like there was weight pressing down on all his body, extremities slow to respond._

" _Ugh…"_

" _You're awake at last," Mr Greer said with characteristic gruffness. There was the beeping of the now-activated nurse call button._

 _Eyes fluttered open, then shut again at the sudden influx of light after a month without. Fingers reflexively tried to curl, but were stiff for want of use._

" _Athair? What happened?" Uileag asked, foregoing the opening of eyes for the moment. "The last I remember, I was at Hueneme and there was an-an explosion?"_

" _Dadi."_

 _Uileag paused, caught off guard by the non sequitur. "Sorry?"_

" _Dadi. I got word from Harvey. You're being considered for a Cross. Even if you don't get it, though, you've earned the right to call me that."_

"By the time I was in college, both my sisters had moved out of home, so it wasn't like I saw them around that much. Mom… I think she had more faith in my aesthetic sense than I deserved." Uileag chuckled weakly. "Not like you were some fashionista anyway to rub good clothing habits off on me."

Ayaka pouted.

"Speaking of history, who would have guessed that the first anniversary of our relationship would actually be… does it still count as 10 years if there's a big gap in between?"

"I don't think so?" Ayaka said doubtfully. "That reminds me, though… what are we going to tell everyone about how we first met?

"That's a good question," Uileag said. "I think we can trust everyone who was around back then with the truth, but what about anyone else?"

" _Ano_ … actually, about that…"

"Hmm?"

"Actually, Gran and Dad figured it out before I had a chance to come up with a cover story."

"They did? Well, I guess we don't need to worry about-"

 _{You-!}_

 _Uileag-in-Ayaka's feet thundered in rapid succession as they closed the distance to her father. Her left hand slapped the desk, which rang loudly from the impact; even as the phone clattered to the floor, her right shot out and took hold of his tie, pulling him out of his chair. Feet kicked as he dangled precariously from the unintentional noose, gurgling helplessly._

Uileag paled. "On second thought, I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

"No, no! Dad said that he's already forgiven you for it."

"That's good to hear," Uileag said, even though from his tone Ayaka figured he wasn't too convinced.

"Speaking of back then, even having had a week to think about it, I'm still wondering how Shin managed to cover for you when you were playing hooky looking for Imamura. Shouldn't your father, as an ex-senior NCO, be very skilled at spotting bull?"

"Ah…"

"Are you really sure his place of employment isn't a CIA or NSA front or something?"

"I really haven't the foggiest." Uileag rubbed his hands on his pants. "He wouldn't be allowed to tell us anyway even if he was."

It was a bit more walking to get to their destination.

Il Giardino Delle Parole. They had made a reservation; weekend nights, it was almost always necessary. This was hardly the first time they had been here, or she had by herself for that matter, but it was only now that she fully understood why it had felt familiar even from the first visit or why she had felt a kinship with the ever-harried waiters.

Uileag stared as Ayaka added a pizza and a second helping of dessert to their order.

"What's wrong?" Uileag asked as soon as the waiter left their table.

"Wrong?"

"You don't normally order that much."

{Uileag, there's something I need to tell you about why the navy wants me,} Ayaka said in Irish.

{Hm?} Uileag was caught a bit off guard by the sudden switch in language, but didn't let it faze him for long.

{I'm-I discovered last Wednesday during the attack that I'm actually a shipgirl.}

Uileag stared, blinking owlishly.

{The Place Promised in our Early Days Original Soundtrack - Attack ~ Sleeping Princess}

YouTube watch?v=CMQAUjMB4VA

{Er, I didn't tell you sooner because I was told that I shouldn't make a big show of it and I thought it was something important, so I thought I should tell you in person rather than over Line or something and-and-and…} Ayaka twiddled her thumbs, trying to figure out what to say next. A little voice in the back of her head started telling her that Uileag was going to freak out and make a scene over her having been replaced by a _thing_ that was wearing her face and pretending to be her and speaking with her voice and acting like her but was really a Terminator or Thing or some other body-snatching monster trying to replace humanity with its own kind and he would roar at her to get away from him, imposter, who or what are you and what have you done with the real-

"Ayaka."

-give her back to him, give back-

"Ayaka. Ayaka Shirokaze."

"Bwah?"

{Whatever, whoever you were in your last life, you're still Ayaka Shirokaze,} Uileag said firmly.

{I-I'm not too sure anymore,} Ayaka confessed nervously. {How do you know the me that was me didn't die last Wednesday, replaced by Iowa who merely has my memories and thinks she's me, but isn't really me?} Other Her wasn't saying anything, which she found all the more worrying. {There's-the field is so new that there's no useful information on what actually happens when a Natural Born Reawakens her true nature.}

Uileag shook his head even as he took her hands in his own and squeezed them. {That doesn't matter to me. It makes no difference; I love you all the same.}

{T-thank you, Uiui.} Ayaka nodded slightly, trying to not let the warmth she felt from the assurance overwhelm her. It didn't, couldn't solve all the issues by itself, but it helped. She didn't manage to stop tears from starting to gather in her eyes, though.

{Anytime, Ayachi.} Trying not to stare as she blinked back the tears, he cast an eye over her attire, then a second, newly scrutinising one. {I remember shopping with you for this dress, though.}

{This dress?} Ayaka looked down at it. {What about-oh.} The sailor collar, the puffy short sleeves, the white underlayer… that did seem a bit familiar, now that she thought about it.

{Did Other You have anything to do with your choosing it?}

{I don't think so, not unless she was unconsciously influencing me in her sleep.} Ayaka shivered. {Not a pleasant thought.}

"I'm right here, you know," Other Her snapped mentally out of the blue. "I'm you."

"That doesn't help," Ayaka shot back.

There was an impression of a sigh from that.

Talk turned to more pleasant things until the food finally arrived. When it did, Ayaka reached for a slice of pizza and brought it to her mouth.

"Shouldn't you be checking the pizza for toothpicks first?" Uileag asked.

"Why?" Ayaka asked. "There are no toothpicks in-in-come on!" She scowled as she realised what was going on.

"You said the same thing last time," Uileag managed to get out during a break in his laughter.

Ayaka's lips quivered for a moment before she joined in too.

Om nom nom nom nom

Uileag stared as most of the pizza just seemed to vanish.

Sheepishly, Ayaka pushed the rest of the plate towards him before she took it all and tried to moderate the pace of the rest of her eating. Not using her rigging might not have left her with the same great hunger, but the extra food still disappeared into her… stomach? Stores? just fine without causing the slightest bloat that had usually come with overeating.

"Let me pay," Ayaka said when the bill came, presenting a credit card to the waiter. "I still owe you a few hundred bucks from all the dessert I splurged on with your money."

"You don't need to."

"No, no, I insist. It's not like I can repay you for such flagrancy any other way."

"You-no." Uileag grit his teeth. "No. Begone, thought."

"Uiui?"

"Sorry." He slapped himself on the back of his head. "Unclean thoughts."

"Do I want to know?" Ayaka asked warily.

"Ah… Ah… remember we made a vow before our parents that postmarital intimacies would remain postmarital and begin no earlier?"

It took a while for Ayaka to connect the dots, but she reddened as soon as she did. " _Baka! Hentai!_ "

Uileag's visage abruptly morphed into a grim one that proved he was very much his father's son, whatever their disagreements. "I seem to recall I was hardly the only one carrying out hardware diagnostics back then."

 _After yet another hectic night at the restaurant, Ayaka crawled languidly into the shower._

 _In there, as the water rained on her, she hesitantly looked down at the body of the boy she was inhabiting. It had taken a few ablutionary events before she had been able to look at the… thing without immediately scrunching her eyes closed and looking away with hurried embarrassment._

 _She knew what it was called and did - she may have been a country girl and in religious training but she wasn't_ that _sheltered, thank you very much! - but she hesitated to actually name it, because she had been taught since young that words had power._

 _She wasn't sure what power the act of acknowledging this would confer and wasn't eager to find out._

 _She tried to twirl her hair and, not catching anything, grumbled as she remembered where she was. Short hair. How annoying. Why would anyone who didn't need to want it short?_

 _Still, it wasn't like this body was going to wash itself._

 _She hesitantly reached down-_

"I-I-no comment!" Ayaka squeaked, turning away guiltily.

Uileag's stern look shattered and he laughed.

" _Actually, forget about not bathing. Please go ahead. You'd better not leave my body stinking!"_

 _Uileag stared at the correction left in the phone a few days later. That indecisive girl, what was she playing at?_

"Where to now?" Ayaka asked after the waiter returned with her card and they left the restaurant.

Uileag pointed. "The park, maybe?"

"Lead on."

The park was quiet tonight, apart from the wind. A few joggers, some fellow lovebirds, but not much in the way of incidental visitors. Fewer than could be attributed to people choosing to spend their Fridays in some other way.

More desensitised or not, after more than 10 years of the End of Terror living up to the lofty title, laxity had started to set in. Last Wednesday's events had hit a bit too close to home for most New Yorkers despite the fact that her presence and the quick arrival of Gonzalez had limited the damage. Even after the lifting of the curfew, people were still hesitant to stay out late. It wasn't the dead silence of a city crippled by fear and shattered by death and destruction, but it had definitely seen livelier nights.

Uileag finally came to a halt somewhere near the banks of the Hudson, and so did she. It wasn't a tiny body of water by any measure, but next to Iowa's memories of the Pacific, it seemed that much smaller.

What a weird thing to think, it still felt like. Sure, it was one thing to believe, with waxing and waning degrees of wholeheartedness, that everything had a spirit. It was an entirely different matter to _be_ the spirit reborn and Reawakened, and it still hadn't quite sunk in despite the week that had passed. Were Other Her's memories really from her past life as a hull of steel, such that pieces of craftsmanship could actually have experiences, form memories? Were they noetic imprints pooled from their crew? Both? Neither?

She felt Uileag's arms encircle her waist delicately, felt him follow the embrace by gently settling his face into her back, her skin tingling pleasantly from the contact.

He had been slow, hesitant even, in working up to this level of intimacy, which made what she now knew about the him of 7 years ago more than a bit dissonant.

Talking about that, maybe he would prefer to instead-

Ayaka's cheeks coloured.

No, no, no.

In an attempt to cast off the unwanted thoughts - no thanks, Uileag - she cast her eyes to the heavens.

"I never truly appreciated the starry skies I could see back in Imamura until it was gone."

There was a bright, fairly close star rapidly climbing skyward. Ayaka wondered if it was a NASA mother ship carrying a spacecraft. In the past week, she had spent time trying to catch up on what she had missed regarding the Abyssal War. There had been articles on NASA's thanks to the USN for selling them the hypertech engines used on the Skyrangers, which had been retrofitted onto existing mother ships. Or energy's frankly miraculous combination of outsize thrust-to-weight, efficiency, stability despite being self-oxidising and cheap, easy renewability was a game changer. Even if the existing mother ships lacked the full containment and reentry survivability to break atmo, and modifying existing spacecraft to use the new engines or making a whole new single-stage-to-orbit spaceplane from the ground up wasn't so easy, the benefits just from cheaply reaching the edge of atmosphere before separating the spacecraft were major.

Still, something about the thoughts made her tense up.

"Wa-sorry." She must have overdone it; Uileag extricated his face from where it had been buried in her back, carefully brushing aside some hair. "What's wrong?"

Ayaka didn't reply for a while.

"You can rely on me more, you know. That's what I'm here for."

"I was…" Ayaka struggled to figure out why she was so miffed. "I was thinking about how Congress could barely spare anything after Imamura's destruction, but abyssals come calling and suddenly they're tripping over themselves to throw money for expanding the International Moon Base at NASA and pushing through approval for the talks about loosening of the Outer Space Treaty." She seethed. "Actual danger from the stars and they sat around doing nothing back then. Now they're all about having a Plan B for mankind's survival. I…" She let out an explosive sigh. "I know intellectually that it's petty, that one pissant country town is nothing compared to the many thousands dead and climbing from the abyssals, but I can't help being just a little resentful."

"That's-the memories bringing both the good and the bad back into focus, then?"

"Yes." Glumly, Ayaka said, "Even in the original timeline when 500 of us died, that didn't hold anyone's feet to the fire, did it?"

"No." Uileag shook his head mournfully. "It didn't."

"Mmph." Ayaka shook her head. "I know I'm not very observant, but I think I would have caught on about the time difference earlier if there had been more vigorous and visible Remember Imamura campaigns."

Uileag chuckled darkly. "Me too. Me too."

"When all's said and done…" Ayaka's thoughts about the past meandered to the previous week, with its revelations, and then to the events they had just discussed. " _Katawaredoki_ … That's twice it's brought us together."

"It's a pity it's so late already, or we could have made it thrice. Still, the moon is beautiful tonight, isn't it?"

Ayaka knew what the saying meant, of course, but there was still something about the way Uileag spoke that sent a strange feeling through Ayaka. There was some flash of movement at the bottom of her field of view, and she reflexively looked down.

There was a small box there held in Uileag's hands, and it had been flipped open.

There was a ring nestled within.

{5 Centimeters per Second Original Soundtrack - Kiss}

YouTube watch?v=khRlVPap8Lg

Ayaka's mind froze for a moment, as if she couldn't believe or comprehend what she was seeing.

When it unscrambled, she was suddenly acutely aware that she couldn't feel Uileag's arms around her any longer.

"Uileag?"

Not seeing him before her, she turned around slowly and her breath caught in her throat at what met her eyes.

Uileag was on his knees, hands outstretched with the ring box presented to her.

" _Watashi ni mainichi misoshiru o tsukutte kuremasen ka?_ " He asked.

She felt tears escape her.

There was really only one way she could possibly have responded.

{Yes!}

With infinite care, he eased the ring out and slid it onto her left ring finger.

There was a faint, almost electric tingle.

Done, Uileag flipped the box shut and put it away, then got to his feet.

Ayaka was ahead of him; stooping, she yanked him up and into a very enthusiastic kiss.

It was more wonderful than any they'd shared thus far.

Warm

Soft

Passionate

Intense

Delightful in ways that words could not properly convey.

No, positively magical.

After they finally broke for air, Ayaka raised her hand to her face, turning it around to look closely at the ring, which was made of gold. Rather than being an unbroken band, it was split but spring-loaded so the two ends would come back together if one tried to separate them. One precious stone was set in each end, one a pink spinel and the other an aquamarine if she remembered the types right.

Something about it seemed a bit familiar.

"I'm sorry," Uileag suddenly said.

Ayaka started and her head snapped to him. "Why? It's beautiful!"

"I thought it was a good idea at the time I had made the custom order from my friend. A spring-loaded split band to symbolise how difficulties can't permanently separate us; I didn't realise until very much later that it might look a bit too much like Fafnir."

Ayaka looked at it again, eyes growing wide in realisation. "Oh. Oh."

There was a pregnant pause, and Uileag began to fear the worst, suddenly feeling sweat on his brow despite the April chill.

Ayaka started laughing and waved it off. "Don't worry, you idiot! I'm fine with it."

Uileag tried to inconspicuously sigh in relief and mop his brow. Ayaka let him.

That said, a sneaking suspicion crept up on her. "You don't happen to have Kas or any of the rest of our friends hiding around here waiting to take a photo, do you?"

"No, no," Uileag said hurriedly.

Unable to get the doubt out of her head, Ayaka cast a look over her shoulder and wondered if she could still detect things without her rigging. She frowned at the thought, and her fingers subconsciously made the motions of weaving a braided cord.

A peculiar not-sound, like thread talking without language.

Awareness filled her mind.

Oh. There were a pair of stray joggers, but Uileag was right in saying that there wasn't anyone lurking about, any hidden cameras waiting to catch the proposal in mid-delivery.

"Now I feel bad," Ayaka said after turning back to him. "What I was intending to give you for today must look pretty insignificant."

"What's that?" Uileag asked.

In answer, Ayaka reached into her handbag and pulled something out.

Blue at the ends, fading to green near the middle. Black bordering red, with more black "splotches" within. At the centre, a black, vaguely draconic shape surrounded by a blue "aura".

It was a twin to the braided cord in Ayaka's hair, and she wrapped it around Uileag's right wrist before clipping it in place, just as he had done for 3 years.

Uileag raised his right hand to look at the new adornment, hesitantly rotating his wrist to study it from all angles. "This-I've tried this too, and even taking into account the skill and experience gap, there's no way you could have made this in just one week." There was confusion and awe on his face when he turned back to Ayaka. "You must have been making this since before we regained our memories."

Ayaka looked away, embarrassed. "Yes, I was. It seemed right to me, though I didn't know why back then. Still, thank you for not making a spectacle of all this. I think I might have died of fright if you had."

"You-ah, you wouldn't have appreciated it either."

"Yes, I'm already dreading the flood of congratulatory messages." Ayaka shivered.

Uileag looked pensive, Ayaka noticed when she looked back to him. "Is-are shipgirl-chasing paparazzi a thing?"

Ayaka's shivers grew in intensity. "I'm worried that might be so." She did know there were people, including within her colleagues, who spent time scrounging for every bit of news on shipgirl activity. "I'm not looking forward to people camping outside my apartment, the family home or the Shrine." She took Uileag's proffered hand and they continued to gaze at the river for a while longer.

"I spent some time thinking about it," Uileag suddenly said softly.

"Eh?"

"I mean, I knew after my injuries that I didn't want to put it off much longer, lest something happen."

They didn't need to vocalise the thought that something had indeed happened.

"And so when last week happened, it went from important to critical."

" _Un_."

"I'm concerned, though, about the wedding arrangements. Any ideas what's going to happen?"

"Gran probably wants a traditional _shinzen kekkon_ ceremony for us. Will your father object?"

"That's a good question," Uileag said. "I don't think he would have allowed me to even date you if he took the proscription against being unequally yoked very seriously, but on the ceremony proper… no, I don't know. Do you have any preference?"

"I hadn't been putting thought into it, even after all that's happened," Ayaka said, embarrassed by the admission. "I'm afraid not."

"Oh. Well, we can cross that bridge when we get to it?"

" _Un._ "

Uileag proceeded to see Ayaka back to her apartment; at the door, he said, "MDL on Sunday afternoon, right?"

"Yes."

"Sure, I'll come over here and go with you then." He paused, thinking. "Oh yes, since you're meeting Morrie and Hitomi tomorrow, can you please tell Morrie I still owe him for his bike?" Uileag pulled up a note on his phone. "Asked some cyclist friends, narrowed down what should be the model based on what we now remember, got the price as it should have been, calculated inflation and a reasonable interest rate… What do you think?"

"I'm not sure he actually remembers you-in-me borrowing and wrecking the bike," Ayaka said doubtfully, but accepted the note anyway. "We did have bigger things to worry about after the Cometfall, after all."

"It's still a debt I need to repay. The principle of the matter."

"Okay, I'll tell him about it then."

They shared a quick goodbye kiss.

"Night!"

"Night!"

===[===]===

April 29

===[===]===

{Kimi no Na Wa./Your Name. Original Soundtrack - Itomori High School}

Spotify track/6lTZhbYrfBPcgW8dXzdRnc

{Ayachi, over here!} Hitomi Yura shouted in Japanese.

{Hitomin! Morrie!} Ayaka replied as she walked over to her friends. {How's Kyouko?}

{Hungry,} Tetsuhiko Morikawa said, grumbling. {No, positively insatiable.}

{Well, she is a growing girl.} Ayaka studied Morrie's jaw, gestured at him. {You haven't been shaving.}

{On how many of our monthly meetings are you going to keep bringing that up?} Morrie asked, scowling even as he unconsciously picked at the stubble. {Not many people in my line care that I don't shave enough, you-oi, oi, oi, isn't this a bit crass?}

{What're you talking about, Morrie?} Hitomi asked in turn, surprised by the _non sequitur_ and the displeasure in his voice.

{Look at the ring Ayaka's got!}

{Oh, Uileag proposed?} Hitomi shot to her feet; caring for the infant had evidently done little to sap her energy. {When? When?! Is that what you wanted to tell us?}

{Oi, pay attention,} Morrie snapped even as he jabbed a finger at the ring.

{What?}

{Pink don't know what stone, aquamarine, the curves - it's a reminder of the Cometfall, that's what it is!}

Hitomi reached for the hand in question; Ayaka let her have it. {Maybe,} she said doubtfully after scrutinising it for a while.

{I don't mind it, really,} Ayaka said. {Even if Uiui and I hadn't regained our memories of those events, I still would have liked it as a sign that we overcame those difficulties.}

{Regained your wha-}

{See? See? She's fine with it!} Hitomi cut him off. {You know Ayachi after all. She would have asked to have it changed if it was too painful to look at,} She sounded just a little smug.

{If you want, though, I can take it off for now.} Ayaka reached for the ring.

{No, don't, don't!} Hitomi said sternly. {If this big oaf really was having traumatic flashbacks or some problem, I'd have known by now. You're no good at hiding things from me, Morikawa Tetsuhiko.}

{Fine,} he reluctantly conceded. {Let's stop standing around and get to eating.}

So they did.

Partway through the meal, Ayaka said, {Oh yes, Morrie, Uileag told me to remind you that he needs to repay you.}

{Huh, what? I don't remember him borrowing anything from me,} Morrie said, frowning.

{I feared as much,} Ayaka said softly to herself. Louder, she said, {Remember your bike? He said he wants to compensate you for wrecking it.} She pulled up the note Uileag had sent with the figures and showed it to Morrie. {This should be the right amount, I think, taking into account inflation and interest.}

{My bike? He wrecked it? When?}

{Ah…} Ayaka tugged at her sidelocks. {10 years ago, on the day of the Cometfall.}

{But that… oh, that bike.} Realisation showed in Hitomi's eyes for a moment, before confusion reasserted itself. {Wasn't that you who borrowed it?}

{Eh? Eh… not quite…}

Great. This wasn't working out. Maybe...

{Actually, there was one other thing I need to tell you. No, make that two, but they're connected. I was told not to spread it around willy-nilly, but I can trust you two, right?}

The two exchanged looks. {Go on.}

{Remember 10 years ago, when I was being weird - well, weirder than usual - and you said it might be due to being possessed or my past life memories?} She asked in a hushed tone.

{Of course, but what does that have to do with anything?} Morrie asked. {Why are you bringing up the past?}

{You were not entirely wrong.}

And so she told them everything, starting from that first day so long ago, all the way until the events of the past week.

When she was done, the two of them stared at her with odd looks. {Well, that explains why he seemed familiar… but still, Iowa? Really?}

{Yes. Why?}

{Somehow, I didn't think Iowa would look like… well, you,} Hitomi said.

Ayaka frowned, getting a feeling of déjà vu. {Then what did you think she would look like?}

Morrie raised a hand to her head. {Well, it does explain your atypical height and your… Your…}

{Figure?} Ayaka helpfully supplied the answer he was struggling to not give.

{She said it, not me!}

Hitomi made tsking sounds. {Aryan, I think. Shrieking patriotism like a banshee version of… What was that ridiculously over-the-top robot thing? Liberty Prime?}

{More like a succubus, with an outfit abbreviated to the point of being fetishistic,} Morrie added.

{You guys too?!} Ayaka barely restrained the urge to shriek in outraged embarrassment. {Why?!}

{Er… good question.}

{Jane's,} Morrie said, as if that one word explained everything.

Ayaka winced. It probably did. Out of morbid curiosity, she had looked up Jane's Fighting Shipgirls to see if the naval resource in question had anything to say about what they thought she would look like as a shipgirl.

Oh, Amaterasu Omikami, man wat

Suffice to say that Quincy had been on the money, though whether they had mined the dopey shipgirl's skull - CIC? - for the idea or she had merely been citing them, Ayaka didn't know and didn't want to know.

A sly thought hit her then, and a smirk crept onto her face. {Actually, Hitomin, I did some reading. Did you know there's actually a Japanese light cruiser named Yura, right down to the same kanji as yours? How do you know you're not her?}

{Ahhhhh, don't even joke about that!} Hitomi exclaimed, trying very hard not to flail her arms about. The fork and knife in hand still trembled violently.

{But in all seriousness, why do Jane's and people keep having this strange impression of what Other Me's supposed to look like?} Ayaka asked, perplexed.

{I'm not sure,} Hitomi admitted.

{I know!} Morrie said sagely. {It's got to do with Shimakaze. I think she said in an interview that she wears so little because wearing more will slow her down. People must think that since you're also a fast battleship, you're going to follow the same line of thinking. Not like Maryland and West Virginia, well-covered and so slow.} He proceeded to do a passable imitation of the aforementioned destroyer's infamous " _osoi~_ "

Hitomi's head swiveled to stare at him with deliberate, ominous slowness. Despite her friend's protests against the idea of being a Natural Born, Ayaka found it almost like a turret swinging into position. {And just how do you know that?}

{I have a friend of a friend whose company was already contracting for the navy even before the drawup started, so it's his business to know about navy-related matters,} Morrie said, maybe a little hastily if Ayaka had anything to say about it.

Hitomi made tutting sounds.

{Besides,} Morrie said, seemingly unchastened, {even if your boyfriend - er, fiancé - were to pay me back, wouldn't I just end up returning it to you as part of the wedding gift?}

{It's the thought, the principle of the thing that counts,} Ayaka said firmly. Nice change of topic, she added in thought.

{Gah, fine. Tell Uileag to send it over.}

Hitomi turned back to Ayaka. {Seriously, though, Ayachi, take care of yourself.}

{We won't be able to help if anything goes wrong out there,} Morrie added.

{I know, you guys,} Ayaka said morosely, not meeting their eyes. {I know.}

{I guess we're not doing this monthly dinner thing anymore, then?} Hitomi asked.

{This training will last 1 month before I get deployed to… it's not set in stone yet, but hopefully we can meet up again first over the Memorial Day weekend. After that, I don't know. We'll see,} Ayaka said distantly.

{You'll still be going for the anniversary memorial, though?} Morrie asked, his eyes sliding downward off her.

Ayaka didn't need to trace his gaze to know what he was looking at. {Definitely.}

===[===]===

April 30

===[===]===

"Ready?" Uileag asked. "I would help or drive you there myself, but-"

"I know, I know, doctor's orders not to exert yourself," Ayaka said, waving it off. "I'm no longer going to crumple trying to carry Gran." She chuckled self-deprecatingly even as she hoisted her luggage into the taxi boot, then got in with him and it set off.

Taxi to New York Penn. Train to Newark Penn. Amtrak HSR down to Trenton. Normal rail again to Bordentown. Cab again for the final stretch to MDL.

Ayaka kept fidgeting in her seat.

Uileag couldn't help a small smile. She might have been neurotic, over-imaginative and too transparent with her emotions, but it sometimes still felt like he didn't deserve her. "Nervous?"

"Of course, even after, well-"

She had done her best to keep up with the publicly-available information on USN Officer Candidate School as he had gone through it, but-

"I'd never thought I would actually need to use it, and I don't know how it's going to be changed to suit our needs."

He squeezed her hand. "You'll be fine. You didn't get _summa cum laude_ by being a lazy idiot."

"Thanks…" she drawled in mock outrage.

It was a bit longer before they got to the base public drop off point at last.

"Tell me where you get posted to after this," Uileag said as he got out too, leaving the driver to wait. "After I'm done with my course, I'll try to see if there's a nearby detachment I can get posted to myself."

"Of course." Ayaka did a final check to make sure everything she had brought was with her before turning back to him, embracing him tightly. "See you!"

"Bye!" Uileag watched Ayaka disappear through the doors of the building before getting back into the taxi to head home. As he did so, he was overcome by a sudden, deep-seated melancholy.

{your name. Original Soundtrack - The Night Inn}

Spotify track/6gUxzSnPUJLY2pjg3eezbI

It stayed with him the whole of the journey back home.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Well, that was a thing. A thousand apologies for the holdup.

The part with Ayaka's boss was another of those bits where we initially thought we could make like bandits, slap down a few perfunctory sentences and get out fast, but it degenerated into an extended discussion.

By max_and_emilytate's interpretation, the perfectly obvious reason why we never see Mitsuha doing regular hardware diagnostics, unlike Taki, is that doing so would have shot the film straight to an R-rating.

The design of the outfit Ayaka was wearing on the proposal date was suggested by be-ta, but it did happily give a minor plot hook to us, so we weren't going to say no.

Here is a preemptive apology to Sayaka and Tessie fans, because this is most likely the only major scene their local counterparts will have. We have great difficulty trying to figure out where else we could squeeze them in. Suggestions are always welcome, of course.

We did make a joke once about Natural Born Sayaka, since the new design for Pacific!Yorktown looks an awful lot like her. Very much noncanon, since it would frankly have been even more trouble than it was worth, but y'all can find it at Pixiv illust_id=61372781 .

Jane's Fighting Shipgirls, getting things wrong since 2015! We found that part of BelBat hilarious.

Our representative, so to speak, at Hon-Haka has let us know of the following question from SchroedingerCat:

"I was just wondering (I will admit it is a personal question), since I have seen your Pacific Iowa fanfiction and Melissa's DA, how you and MAET work together on putting together your fanfiction alongside your commissions."

Regarding this question, we planned out the major points of the story first. There isn't really a rigorous criteria for which of these we deemed important or random enough to immortalise as art, to be frank. Though as this chapter demonstrates, we do occasionally end up changing things after the art is already done. *shrug* Oh well. S'long as most of the art remains accurate, that's good enough. We don't have limitless budget to go back and get changes done. Not sure even limitless budget would make our desires possible; after all, the hypothetical VA/ _seiyuu_ for Ayaka would still be Mone Kamishiraishi, but with native English and Irish fluency, which is probably bloody impossible/10. =_=


	10. Chapter 9

Authors' notes: The usual "Do you even US Navy" disclaimer applies; there are always a thousand and one things that are dubious. Still looking out for anyone willing and able to advise on these matters.

===[===]===

CHAPTER NINE

===[===]===

Alice was waiting for her after she cleared the security procedures. "Welcome back! Got everything you were supposed to?"

"I hope so," Ayaka said, tugging at her sidelocks with her left hand.

Alice stared, wide-eyed, at the ring on Ayaka's finger that the gesture had inadvertently highlighted. "Wow! Congratulations!"

"Ehhe, thank you," Ayaka said, a little embarrassed.

"When was it? When was it? Did he do anything special?"

"No, not really. Friday was our anniversary. He doesn't do big fancy things, just sprung it on me after dinner."

"Oh," Alice said. "So there won't be any crazy footage of him having rented billboard airtime in Times Square or a squadron of stunt fliers to sky write the proposal for all to see?"

"What?" Ayaka boggled. "No!"

"Aw... Isn't a creative proposal the best part of any wedding video?" Alice was disappointed.

"Seriously!"

Alice shrugged. "Oh well, moving on. Today is going to be mainly housekeeping matters. You're going to take the oath of office first along with the rest of your class. Preliminary briefings, room assignments, collecting your outfit and stuff from the quartermaster, including the security pass."

"Lead on."

===[===]===

There were about 20 shipgirls in the auditorium Alice left her in, the majority of which were unsurprisingly destroyers looking like middle schoolers. Proportionally a few more were cruisers, leaving only a smattering of capships like herself. Most were sitting unflinchingly straight, but a few had confusion or nervousness clear on their faces. Probably fellow Natural Borns. Ayaka wondered if it was due to internal warbooks that she knew who all of them were despite never having set eyes on their human forms before. Apparently there were an average of 60 American shipgirls total returning a month, although divided across the three coasts' bases. Whether this rate would continue remained unknown.

After some waiting, the base commander showed up and gave a speech thanking them for their return to service in the name of the nation and the people.

After that, the CO of Amalgam 111, Construct Nine's training amalgam, showed up to administer the oath of office.

"I, Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai, do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…"

A bunch of briefings and assignments followed.

Her outfit, when she got it, felt comfy enough to sleep in, which got grumbling from the fairies about how, back in their day - all the periods in question - the navy could never issue clothing in the right size and quality.

===[===]===

"Hey, Ayachi!" Uileag said when he picked up the phone.

"Hi, Uiui."

"How you finding your reintroduction to the navy?"

"Well…"

{Rise of the Triad (2013) Original Soundtrack - Cccool}

YouTube watch?v=WUlTIJcr9iw

Splash.

Ayaka planted a hand on the waters of Sandy Hook Bay and pushed herself back onto her feet, coughing and spluttering incoherently as she shook water off and wiped her face. A small part of her brain was still amazed and confused at being able to do so.

The training course was essentially a compressed adaptation of Officer Candidate School, such as it were. Physical training and rifle drill were cut down to the minimum - studies were ongoing but short-term results showed there wasn't much exercise could do for the fitness of people who put out thousands of horsepower - but that still left naval history, engineering and weapons, damage control, naval orientation and warfare, leadership, seamanship, navigation and military law.

"Confusing."

Ayaka didn't have much of an edge here compared to her classmates. There were indeed things that were timeless, but others had changed enough even from the 80s that Other Her's memories didn't make much difference. Sometimes, the conflicting doctrines between the ways of the '40s, the '50s and the '80s, swirling in her head, just made things worse.

"There's a lot we're getting rushed through."

You could drill a seaman until he could do his duty purely by rote and reflex, but if that was all one was good for, he was never going anywhere fast. No, office demanded understanding. Knowing what the methods and formulae meant and did and why instead of blindly throwing data into their fire directors and fairies and letting the devices do all the work. One could only know when to deviate from the playbook after knowing what actually was in the playbook, after all, and all the more so when the abyssals were turning so much of established doctrine on its head.

"I finally understand how your father can doze off so easily - because he had to."

For training on the actual shipgirl things, they got trucked out to Naval Weapons Station Earle. Getting used to the tight manoeuvres they now could do at their greatly reduced footprints, target practice, that sort of thing.

Truck rides weren't much of a respite. There wasn't a view worth talking about from the canopied bed except directly behind, and it was pretty jerky.

A nap sounded quite tempting, if not for the fact that the screen mounted on the front end of the truck bed was blaring more educational material, squeezing in every minute of time that could be gotten.

The Sierra Mikes on board just kept sitting ramrod straight, listening unblinkingly.

Just staring straight ahead at the video being played.

"Summons, though…"

"Hmm?"

Ayaka paused, unsure how to put it diplomatically, before eventually deciding to just rip the bandaid off. "Fresh Summons/Manifestations are creepy."

There. She said it.

Fellow Natural Borns were perfectly human in behaviour as far as she could tell, probably because they had been born and grew up believing themselves to be such. The Summoned that had been around longer had had enough "humanity" osmose in that they could pass quite convincingly, though like with Vulcan's knife stunt, they sometimes slipped. As for Washington, Ayaka privately wondered how far she had actually grown out of that stage.

The ones that had come back less than a month, though, they creeped her out, even after the one-week acclimatisation course given fresh out the summoning chambers in an attempt to help them get used to the new world they found themselves in. That might not have been a high hurdle, but it still said something.

The eyes that forgot to blink, the lungs that forgot to breath, or did so with inhuman regularity, like on a timer. The microexpressions on the face that, though Ayaka lacked the formal training to interpret, were still conspicuous by their absence. Little tics and twitches that normal humans did unconsciously, almost never paid attention to in daily life, yet somehow starkly obvious when missing even if most couldn't clearly put a finger on it. All contributed to the palpable feeling of wrongness that Sierra Mikes gave off.

Worst, though, was the jerkiness.

The jerkiness.

Snap.

Stop.

Snap.

Stop.

The inhuman, mechanical, sudden start and stop jerkiness.

The class had been shown actual footage of the SEALs in action, and Ayaka herself had occasionally been sent videos of martial arts masters for whom the well-worn clichés of "no wasted motion" or "economy of action" were truth rather than pithy sayings. As frighteningly fast, precise and well-oiled as they had been, there was still a recognisably human smoothness, a flow to their moves. Fresh Summons didn't have that.

Like stop motion done badly, marionettes with unskilled puppeteers. Turrets with the turn speed governors turned off.

Much as she tried to consciously ignore it, the uncanny valley kept gnawing at her.

"It doesn't help that whenever my roommate, a Sierra Mike, wakes, she…"

Well, Ayaka had seen it from Uileag's end. Now she understood why Kagami had always had a peculiar expression on her face whenever walking in on Uileag-in-her.

Seriously, was having a human body that fascinating?

At the end of each day, the class spent time in the repair docks, even if all that was needed was just routine maintenance rather than any serious damage - and yes, there had been the occasional sight of a visibly damaged shipgirl, clothes torn and form bloodied or worse, having to be supported in.

The building, at least from the outside, could pass as an _onsen_. It looked the part even up to the pre-bath showers, and the first time she had set eyes on it, fairies had grumbled about the deviation from a properly Spartan military aesthetic. The unorthodox look had apparently been tested and shown as necessary to shave a vital few percentage points off of repair time. It was when one got to the "baths" proper that the aberration set in.

It wasn't the slight, pleasant hint of magic the repair fluid gave off.

"The baths are more like pools! Pools!" Ayaka screeched into the phone. "Did Texans design these things, the heretics?"

The majority were Olympic-sized pools with deep centres rather than the traditional shallow small tubs only big enough to immerse a few people. Even taking the larger size of the historical US Navy into account, it seemed like overkill.

The first time Ayaka had walked into the bath area and seen someone doing laps, she had stared disbelievingly, put a foot in to check the water was properly hot, then strode sharply back to the showers to blast her face with a bracing jet of water.

She had returned to find that no, she had unfortunately not been hallucinating the swimming heretics.

To make things worse, a projector and speakers kept the imparting of education going even when they should have been relaxing away their woes and wounds. That was a pity, because Vulcan's shilling appeared to be on the money; the first time Ayaka had emerged from a repair dock, she had found herself rejuvenated in a way that even a week of daily sleeping in couldn't compare to, as if almost 27 years' worth of stress microfractures and other accumulated minor damage had been healed right. Considering all her old scars were gone, that probably was the case.

If there was one silver lining to all this, the teaching of magic was sufficiently offbeat to be distracting.

{The Kingsmen - Louie Louie}

YouTube watch?v=4V1p1dM3snQ

"Welcome to Basics of Magic! I'm Stingray, SS-161, your course instructor."

Stingray was a grey-eyed, ponytailed blonde of average figure, standing in a slight, casual slouch, clad in a short-sleeved khaki shirt and knee-length shorts. It looked like the now-defunct Working Khakis but was somehow off in a way Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. The shirt was open, revealing a T-shirt with "Welcome Aboard" typed on it and an arrow pointing downwards.

Okay, maybe "silver lining" was a little optimistic.

Ayaka blinked, barely managed to suppress an open gawk at the other shipgirl. Stingray had to know what the tee was saying, right?

… Right?

There was a hapless "teaching assistant" shipgirl hovering around her, frantically taking notes. Some distance away, a launch idled, the NAVENSCIWARCOM and BERND personnel on board pointing sensor gear at the class.

"You look familiar, Ma'am, but I can't recall where I've seen you before," someone said.

"Oh, that's alright. We'll have plenty of time to get to know each other. We're not here to talk about me, though. I'm here to get you started on magic. Yes, I know the official term the brass wants used is 'enlightened science', but let's not lie to ourselves! It's magic~"

Stingray snapped her fingers.

"Let's get one thing straight first. This is a basic course. There's so much in the way of uncharted waters that we're learning new things every day. You're not expected to know everything at the end of this month and definitely won't. Pretty much everything else will have to be learnt on the job.

"Now, some of you might already be familiar with Artillery Spotting or Stepping. What's the difference, you ask? Those are linear sorcery or hedge magic, or Extraordinary Arts if you want the 'proper' term, not the magic of the Spheres. There's only one trick to a path with these, though they have their own store separate from the rest - you can still use them if your store of Spherical procedures is empty."

Stingray paused here and began staring at the class.

Staring.

Ayaka started feeling nervous sweat creep down her back, but she hadn't the foggiest why the instructing shipgirl had suddenly paused.

Eventually, Stingray frowned and disappointedly said, "You know, you lot were supposed to ask me a question."

"Ask you what, Ma'am?" Someone finally asked.

"Think! I left an obvious opening."

"What's a capital-S Sphere, Ma'am?" Someone else asked.

"That is the correct question!" Stingray pointed at the asker with both index fingers. "All magic can be divided into ten domains, formally Spheres or Arcana. Correspondence/Space, Death, Dimensional Science/Spirit, Entropy/Fate, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Primal Utility/Prime and Time. No one's expected to know all of them, so don't worry. Your first contact with the supernal and history might predispose you towards certain Spheres, but you can learn more as you go along.

"Any questions right now?"

A hand rose. "Nine of these Spheres are obvious, but what's Prime?"

"Ah, yes! Prime is the Sphere of Truth, the Supernal Fire in its purest form. Everything comes from Prime and everything eventually goes back to it. Other Spheres let you manipulate their respective domains of reality; Prime lets you manipulate magic itself. Altering, dispelling, imbuing supernal effects, the transfer, conversion to and creation of Or Energy, manipulation of supernal uplinks and Infrastructure; Prime governs all that."

Another hand. "Vulcan was telling us when we first came back about the supernal realm. Is that where our energy comes from, why we don't need to actually eat a few hundred men's worth of food to tank up unlike last time?"

"Bingo! Come on, people, applaud the smart cookie!" Stingray started clapping and the class followed. "Or Energy, the mana from Heaven! Make a small inlay as below, get a large output as above! Iteration says we might actually get a perpetual motion machine soon. You should ask the folks in Project Silver Ladder if you want to know more of the nitty-gritty; they're the pan-VALKYRIE bunch in charge of finding out more."

Someone else. "You said we have stores that can run out. What happens if we do, or we flub a procedure?"

"Don't," Stingray said, abruptly straightening up, levity gone. "Seriously, don't. I know you fellow Sierra Mikes obviously weren't at Second Pearl, but any of the November Bravos at or near the attacked bases on the New Date of Infamy?"

"No, Ma'am!" Ayaka and the other Natural Borns replied.

"No, I guess not. You'd probably have Reawakened there and then and joined the fight if you had been. You lot probably haven't seen the full picture then. The New Date of Infamy and the Week of Blood? They earned their capitalisations. No hypertech missile seekers, no repair fluid, none of the little and big conveniences we already have, maybe take for granted. The few of us back then were even more overstretched than we already are now, because apart from a few particularly lucky or tricky bastards, the Navy and the Russkies and the Chinchillas and the Limeys and basically everyone were busy making stormtroopers look good. Ever seen a shipgirl bleeding from internal backlash because she's cannibalising herself to squeeze out more Or Energy than the bandwidth of her supernal uplink normally provides?"

A horrified shudder surged through the class at that.

"So watch your usage, and get UNREP from a sufficiently capable Primeworker if you need. Don't overburden them, though; they have their limits too, and no one's figured out how to flash-forge Infrastructure yet, not even me. Next!" Stingray slouched back down, back to her usual levity like nothing had happened.

"Do a-abyssals have magic too?" Someone asked. Discomfited more by the history lesson or the attitude whiplash, it wasn't easy to tell.

"Magic? Oh, no, no Sphere magic, not that we've seen, only linear tricks."

Ayaka found herself thinking back to the Battle of New York and the Ru hurling shells at her like Izanami's firehose.

"True magic, though? They don't. We hope. You see one doing something new, call in a Case Jotun first and call it in yesterday. Let the analysts decide whether we really have something to panic about. Anything else?"

When no one raised any more hands, Stingray said, "Now, there is one big thing about magic that I need to go into, and it really has the doctrine folks and eggheads - sorry, research staff - in a tizzy.

"Foci.

"You see, magic, stripped down to the fundamentals, is simple. Imagine the effect you want and will it to be, and hey presto!"

She paused.

The pause dragged on.

"I'm hearing a 'but', Ma'am," someone eventually said.

"You can hear my butt? My, my." She raised a finger to her mouth. "Do you know any strapping gentlemanly engineers who can help with a close inspection? Wouldn't do for any abyssals to hear me."

"I-I'll have to check, Ma'am," the shipgirl in question uttered nervously.

"Please do!" Stingray said before turning back to the rest of the class. "Spellcasting sounds straightforward, but it isn't. There are many things one has to consider in forming the imago of a spell. Just a few things: size, complexity, area, targets, desired effect, duration. Think you have the focus and knowledge necessary to juggle all that in your CICs?"

A few hands rose.

"How about in the heat of combat?"

The hands dropped and there was silence.

"Well, at least this batch is honest! Most of us can't work magic purely and solely through willpower, ironic though it may be that ours is the Art of Willworking. That's where foci come in. Think of them as mnemonics for the imagination, crutches or shortcuts if you must, to make spellcasting easier. The problem is that there's little standardisation. What you saw when you touched the supernal during your summoning or Reawakening, established your supernal uplink for the first time, is immensely personal and hard to explain to others in material plane terms, and that influences how you perceive and work magic. Everyone has their own individual approach that clicks best, and trying to force a square peg into a round hole rarely works well, demanding personalised teaching more akin to a master-apprentice relationship than the industrialised mass production that is our historical strength. That's why Iteration is kicking up such a fuss about hypertech.

"For some of us, we work with what we already have. Using Forces or Space to make your shells fly faster and further, Life or Matter to supercharge damage control and repair processes. For others, it's not so straightforward. Signs, seals and symbols of occult or personal significance. Martial arts forms. Faith, meditation and prayer. Stimulants and substances.

"Hopefully legal," she added in a stage whisper.

Aloud, she went on. "Communion with spirits. Runes and rituals. Weird and wonderful devices. Code and data. Instinct and intuition. Value financial or otherwise. There are countless ways one can perceive the influence of the supernal on the material, and thus our ability to reshape the world, more than I could hope to limit by naming.

"Tango-Lima-Delta-Romeo: All this can be boiled down into three key aspects." Stingray counted on her fingers. "Paradigm: How do you perceive supernal workings? Practice: How do you turn that perception into action? Instruments: What do you use in that practice?"

She turned back to the class and was met with another wall of silence, broken only by discreet, confused murmurings.

"I know it's a lot to take in, even for the November Bravos who come from a mystical or religious background, to say nothing of mechanistic Sierra Mikes like most of us who have difficulty thinking beyond our previous lives as ships. That's fine! If there's a capital-T Truth to all this, it's both more complex and more transcendent than can be easily explained. We all have a lot to learn, even old seabitches like yours truly.

"Not to fear, though. Everyone might have individual foci, but there is still common ground that can be taught. We call them rotes, spells that have been refined and distilled through widespread use across many differing foci into a classroom-teachable checklist or recipe, if you will. Maybe you'll help develop some yourself? We'll start with the Practice of Knowing, a simple thing which directly downloads information from the selected Spheres into your head, things you wouldn't be able to pick up by optics, radar or sonar alone. In principle, I disagree with anything that makes me work harder to hide, but whatever keeps you lot afloat against enemy subs. It's straightforward enough almost everyone can do even before you know what foci you use. Here's what you need to do…"

===[===]===

"How's everything?" Alice asked one dinnertime later that week.

Ayaka made to chew and swallow the mouthful she was working on before answering. "There's a lot going on. Need to rush off to night lessons after this."

"Ugh, don't remind me," Alice replied. "No liberty this first weekend either, right?"

"No. Where's everyone else, though?"

"Sara is doing planning. I think. I think, because I caught her blushing to herself and murmuring dreamily a couple of times. Wash… the last I saw, she was reciting the UCMJ aloud."

"Makes just as much sense as anything," Ayaka uttered.

"Quincy…"

As if on cue, the base PA rang out with idol pop that started with "1 2 3 Hi! Quinciquin Quinciquin Quinciquin oh oh oh oh", followed shortly by an irate "How is Quincy doing that?! The PA says it's not in use!"

"Well, there you have it."

Despite the saccharine idol pop continuing to play, Ayaka's eyes were drawn to a familiar sullen dyed redhead shuffling into the mess hall, a larger shipgirl close on her heels.

"O'Bannon?"

"Yep. Bannie got a week's brig time. For the month afterward, she's confined to quarters outside of standby, deployment or mealtime, with an escort in the last case. Sensitivity classes too."

Ayaka noted an ankle tracker bracelet on her.

"Albacore? No, wait, let me guess. I don't know why, but... stealing pants?"

Alice winced and very carefully did not take a look at a nearby table where a bunch of giggling, lip-biting shipgirls were playing telekinetic smack dat with any men in sight. "More like getting in them."

===[===]===

"I see some of you lot have melee weapons," Stingray asked a few sessions later. "What's your opinion on close range?"

"CLOSE RANGE?" A few members of the class sputtered simultaneously, then turned to look at all the kindred spirits who had spoken out of turn as well. Quite a few of those were the sharp snaps of the Summoned; it didn't take much effort on Ayaka's part to imagine that, for all the great stories both within and without their navy of Davids sticking it to Goliaths from within their reach, deliberately getting close and personal with the enemy usually didn't come as a first resort.

She glanced meaningfully at her umbrella. Stingray had brought them through meditative priming exercises to help discover what their foci were.

 _Listen to the thread. As you keep twining, emotions will start running between you and the thread._

 _A thousand years of Shirokaze history is etched in these braided cords._

 _Connecting thread and people is_ musubi.

 _Making braided cords is the god's art and represents the flow of time itself._

The lessons of yore had come to her, and it hadn't been hard to figure out that she could use the motions of weaving braided cords as an instrument. Yet something else eluded her still, as if there was a resource yet untapped.

 _Arm from in to out. Sharp without being jerky. Flowing without being slack._

 _Slide the foot to the side, smooth and with purpose._

 _A pause, calculated and accurate._

 _Pirouette._

 _A strangely familiar tingle._

 _Fleeting impressions across her mind._

 _Another swiping motion._

 _Simultaneously unexpected and foreseen, her umbrella forms itself in her hand._

It was in dancing the _kagura_ as part of her prayers that night that a supernal spark had hit her, something that the her of 10 years ago would probably not have appreciated.

It had felt a bit weird using the umbrella as a stand-in for a _nusa_ , though, and she was in no hurry to tell her grandmother. It probably wasn't right to use the umbrella as a substitute for the ceremonial Shinto wand, even if it was spawned from the supernal… Was it? She tried to imagine what that conversation would be like.

{Gran, _ano…_ will the gods mind if I use my shipgirl umbrella as a substitute _nusa_ to dance the _kagura_ as a focus?}

Imagined-Ichiyo turned from the newspaper she was reading to stare over her glasses at her very pointedly.

Ayaka hurriedly shook away the thought.

"Indeed," Stingray went on while she had been agonising. "You never know when you might need it. Same reason why all our human comrades have MCMAP or MAC training. You'll have to see the operational requirements and preferences of the amalgam you get assigned to. Now, let's begin with a simple lunging rote to charge and punch. Our Japanese friends call it something starting with a 'ga', I think, but that's not important right now.

"First, visualise yourself rapidly lunging towards a target. Now, put your hands together. Pull your left hand back like you're winding up for a punch. If you have a melee weapon, hold it in your left hand, even if you're right handed. Form your right hand into a V and slide it forward like you're wiping your weapon or arm. Slide your left leg back and put your weight on it." Stingray demonstrated the parts one at a time.

"Got all that? Good. Now do them simultaneously. You will know when you've gotten the form right. It will just click, and an aura will spring to life around you." She combined the parts into one motion, and as promised, a khaki aura trimmed with gold appeared around her.

It did, surprisingly. Ayaka's was mainly blue with a border of black; from what she saw, it seemed the aura colours used the shipgirl's main clothing colour as the body with hair colour as trim.

"Make sure your firing lines dead ahead are clear."

There was some shuffling around at this.

"Now, you," Stingray pointed at one of the class once they were ready, "punch."

The shipgirl in question punched forward.

For a brief moment, she crackled with blue lightning.

Water exploded out from her starting point, accompanied by the crack of a sonic boom. Water flew violently everywhere along the path she had targeted, and when she reappeared some distance away, blue lightning continuing to flow over her briefly, the water blasting forth ahead of her.

Stingray broke out the applause; after a pause, the rest of the class joined in. "Great work! You'd notice that, unlike a Step, you actually have to move through space and will thus smash into obstacles. Now, this is just the most basic rote. There are many different ways to expand or improve on it and I'm sure those who want to or whose assigned amalgams specialise in CQC will want to work on it. First, though, we need to get the fundamentals down. The rest of you, your turn!"

===[===]===

Sometime fourth week of training

===[===]===

{Perturbator - Electric Dreams}

Soundcloud /devolverdigital/perturbator-electricdreams

Ayaka looked at the food before her and sighed.

"What's wrong?"

She looked up to see Alice standing before her with her own trayful of food.

"Ah, er… Ah! Sorry, where are my manners. Please sit."

Alice dubiously took the offered space, but continued to look at her with a raised eyebrow.

Ayaka squirmed under the attention. "I…"

Fortunately, Alice eventually turned her attention to the food, and Ayaka took to her own meal while trying to decide what to say. The second week had finally deigned to spare their weekends, but kept the late lessons going. It was only in the third that the instructors had relented and let them have sensible night hours.

"I-"

Ayaka thought about it. Pretty much everyone who wasn't completely hopeless at Fate and Time could do a simple futurecast, running a hyperstat entropic/temporal projection to Know whether a given course of action might turn out beneficial or baneful in the near future. She had discovered after some experimentation, though, that she could get a longer-term check or a few seconds' worth of detailed, proper precognition, rather than a mere momentary flux, if she built on the rote the right way.

Something drove her to do the last now, and her surroundings took on a fuzzy quality, somewhere between a watercolour painting and an old VHS tape.

"I think Quincy was right."

Alice jerked in the seat, choked on her food.

Could shipgirls even choke? Ayaka wondered frantically even as the nearest fellow occupants of the mess hall turned to look. No, no, no, she didn't want to know. Weaving the threads, an effort of will-

Her surroundings returned to normal, a quick check confirming that, as before, the vision itself hadn't taken any real time.

"You might want to swallow first."

Confused, Alice nevertheless complied.

"I think Quincy was right."

Alice coughed, but fortunately didn't have anything to choke on this time around. "What? Say again?"

"I think Quincy was right."

"About?"

"What I should have come back as."

"Why?"

"Stingray spoke to me after class recently, said that there's talk of putting me through further leadership classes after I'm done here. Word is that with how rare a more than minimal grasp of the Sphere currently is, as well as the utility it offers, the brass has an eye on where I could go."

"What's wrong then?"

"I don't believe I'm leadership material, someone who should be trusted with that kind of power. There are actual lives at stake, not just grades or honour. Trying to see that far is useless, but I'm scared I'll make the wrong call and get people hurt or worse."

Alice made contemplative sounds. "What does that have to do with Quincy's delusions?"

"Somehow, I have this feeling that if Other Me had come back as, well, not me but the Quincy Delusion," Ayaka said softly, "we wouldn't be having this conversation, this confession of doubt. You'd instead have a Wonder Woman who knows no fear or shame, who would have just laughed off Number Two or any mistakes made. I haven't had any questions from the media yet, so I guess Admiral Adams was right about not pushing me into any PR matters, but surely my namesake's governor and the journalists would prefer the Quincy Delusion. An inspirational figure who could shrug off getting her armour and clothing, what little of it, shredded with a smile and a _dojikko_ pose." She placed a balled-up fist on her head for emphasis, though not a smile. "Not me."

Other Her didn't say anything to that.

"I wish I understood how that feels," Alice said.

"You don't want to have to."

"No, I do. I really do. Not being a nutcase? Not all it's cracked up to be."

Ayaka blinked, looked confusedly at Alice. The analytical part of her mind noticed the slightest hint of quiet desperation in her friend's voice, which otherwise hadn't wavered from its usual cheer.

"Look, don't think this is some glorification of mental illness nonsense like with those Dumblr idiots of the late 2010s. No one should ever romanticise being trapped in her own head. My hometown, my namesake, it wasn't small enough to go ignored by Terror, and I myself was personally affected."

"Oh. I'm sorry. My-"

"Don't be."

Ayaka gave her an odd look.

"I bounced back just fine. Can't say the same for my family and friends, and I wish I could understand why. I sort of knew I was supposed to stay sad just a little longer, not just let go like that, but all there was was calm acceptance." Alice shrugged. "I just couldn't see why the people around me couldn't move on and I wish I could understand. Even Other Me's feeling on sudden bright light doesn't last; I don't spend every nighttime moment fearing a sudden flash shattering the dark or keeping everywhere lit up."

"Must be nice. Wish I were you."

That kind of peace was rather alluring. Alice might think the inability to empathise with a depressive to be a curse, but if you asked Ayaka, after these years of having a looming, clinging spectre of longing and regrets that no amount of therapy or medication had managed to totally purge, it sounded like a good idea.

Alice pursed her lips. "Is it? The grass must be pretty yellow on your side."

They finished dinner without saying more. Afterwards, Alice asked, "Any plans for later?"

"No, why?"

"It's my turn to provide for movie night and I thought I'd get you in on it." She started walking off in the direction of the light cruiser dorms, Ayaka following behind.

"Oh. What're you planning?"

"Have you heard of Makoto Shinkai?"

"Who?" Ayaka felt something strange on hearing the name, as if she should know it.

Alice blinked. "Oh, right! Sometimes I forget he's not quite a household name, persistently undying talk about him being the New Miyazaki aside. He's an anime director, among other roles, with a focus on romantic drama, sometimes with sci fi elements. His last film currently holds the international record for highest-grossing anime film, though it still hasn't dethroned the first place in Japan proper."

"So, what's so special about him?"

"He's just got this way about him, you know? This _je ne sais quoi._ " Alice began gesturing excitedly in the air. "Just knows how to put a film together - narrative, visuals, sound design - in a way that lets you savour all the little emotions. Just seems to know how to depict the alienation, the loneliness that lies at the heart of man, the sorrowful gust of wind that blows between you and me. Put it out there in a way that touches you where you can believe in it." She jabbed herself in the chest in illustration.

"Sounds rather depressing," Ayaka said as they reached the dorms, took off their footwear and passed through a common area towards the rooms proper.

"Oh, he's got nothing on Anohana or Grave of the Fireflies, don't worry. Still, he must have gotten the message, because his latest is a lot more cheery. The new composer probably helped. It worked out quite well despite our misgivings that some J-rock band could match Tenmon's work. That said, a good cry every now and then is a good thing, isn't it?"

"You don't-"

One of the rooms they passed had a young lady watching something on a monitor. Gunfire and a mess of voices sounded; Ayaka caught a glimpse of some colourful FPS. Before they got far, though, the lass turned to them. "Hullo. Friend of yours, Lanty?" she said in a resonant voice that sounded North English.

"Yup!" Gesturing at Ayaka, Alice said, "This is Iowa."

"Blimey! You're a big girl." She craned her neck up; eyes blue flecked with white, like foaming sea, met brown. "Charybdis of the _Dido_ -class light cruisers, pennant number 88, here with the liaison detachment from across the pond at the request of the EDA and Chaldea."

"That's the Chaldea Enlightened Science and Security Organisation, the pan-European equivalent to BERND?" Ayaka asked, recalling her studies.

"The same. Ah, come in, come in!"

So they backpedalled and did. The now-identified light cruiser was clad in something that superimposed Carthaginian influences on a World War Two Royal Navy uniform. Her blue hair was messily splayed in a manner that reminded Ayaka of a whirlpool.

Her face, though…

"You look a bit like…"

"Emma Watson?" Charybdis asked.

Ayaka nodded.

"Ho! Don't worry, I'm used to people saying that. All us _Didos_ are. We're a bunch of…" she turned to Alice. "What's the term, Lanty, from that Japanese game thing? Entropy Venti something?"

"Japanese… oh, you mean Saberface?"

"Yes, that! We lot are a bunch of Grangerfaces, have been ever since Hermione came back first looking like Ms Granger." She took a long swig out of a water bottle. "No Overwatch tonight? Maya's dominating again. I was planning on joining after she finished this round."

A Texan-drawled "It's High Noon" emanated from the computer's speakers, and Ayaka looked at the screen in time to see a bunch of kill notifications pop up courtesy of [Bokukan]MayaSama1930, followed by some very loud victorious crowing in Japanese.

"Sorry, Char, it's my turn to run movie night. Another day."

"Pity. Another time then! Cheerio!"

They left the room and continued on to Alice's.

" _Bokukan_? Doesn't that mean…"

"Yup! Maya started a clan for us anti-aircraft ships. She mains McCree. I run with Dad 76. Do you play too?"

"'fraid not, no."

"Pity… oh yeah! There's another thing about Shinkai you've got to know about, the main selling point that even those who dislike his storytelling still rave about."

"Which is?"

Alice led the way into her room, her roommate out at the moment, and pointed at some giant photos of cityscape and environment shots, surrounded by posters of hunks both 2D and 3D. "That."

"Isn't that a photo-"

Ayaka realised what she was looking at.

"Eh? Eh? Ehhhhh?! That's not a photo?!"

"Nope." Alice grinned broadly. "Accurate depiction of environments, be they his current residence of Tokyo, countrysides or even individual interiors, has always been his trademark."

"Wow…"

Alice giggled. "Yeah, that's the standard reaction to seeing his art direction." She padded over to a row of disc cases and began skimming through them. "Sorry, I only brought my 4Ks. Didn't want to risk my 8Ks, and there isn't a 8K player or projector here anyway. The tech upgrade cycles may have finally gotten to the point that 4K players and projectors are finally reasonably-priced, but 8K is still no casual purchase, and I guess we don't really see a need to pool together the money for one. Not like there's much 8K content yet, whether on Netflix or Crunchyroll or something."

"That's fine." A part of Ayaka noted to herself that her late hometown had been rather far behind the curve on tech matters. The Shirokaze home had only been on its first HD TV when Fafnir had struck, and not for want of money.

"Oh, wait!" Alice paused, looked up from her search. "Shouldn't leave you standing around." She walked over to an extensive collection of books and pulled one out. "Here."

It was an artbook with a lush vista for a front cover image.

Somehow, a sense of aching desolation struck Ayaka on seeing it.

A Sea of Yearning: The Art of Makoto Shinkai, Volume 2.

"I'll be quick!" Alice shouted as she went back to searching through her collection.

Curious.

Flipping through the book and admiring the beautiful backgrounds on display, Ayaka eventually reached a section on miscellaneous and unfinished concepts.

A few entries in, what she saw there made her freeze.

The rough sketch of a half-done key visual loomed before her. The background was an oddly muted blue sky with wispy grey clouds, a small full moon near the top.

There were a pair of curved strokes over the sky, and though the colours were wrong-

 _A chill ran down Ayaka's spine as she saw Fafnir split in two, one piece leaving a glowing red tail and the other blue shot through with purple._

"Found it!" Alice's voice rang out, startling her out of the fugue. The younger girl was grinning brightly, a still substantial pile of disc cases in hand.

Ayaka took her eyes off the sky and studied the rest of the sketch. The bottom part of the image was split in twain by a diffraction spike. On the left, a cityscape reminiscent of photos she had seen of Tokyo; given the director's love of his city, which he had repeatedly depicted in photorealistic detail, it probably was meant to be just that. A messy-haired schoolboy in a grey blazer and a loose red necktie took up the foreground.

Ayaka wasn't sure if her eyes were playing tricks on her, but he looked vaguely familiar, and in his right hand… was that a pistol?

The right side of the sketch showed a grassy plain leading to hills in the background. There was a _torii_ at the top of some stairs in the distance.

That wasn't what caught her attention, though.

What caught her attention was the schoolgirl in the right foreground. Short black hair with a red ribbon, a brown blazer and skirt for her uniform, but what was it that bothered her about-

Ayaka gasped once it finally clicked.

"What's wrong?" Alice asked, and Ayaka tore her eyes away from the sketch to realise that the younger girl had been regarding her with obvious concern, seeing Ayaka staring at the book so intently.

Wordlessly, Ayaka turned the artbook around to show her.

Alice looked at the sketch.

Looked at her.

Back at the sketch, then back to her again.

Confusion and shock played over her face. "What."

Ayaka didn't know what to say.

Owlishly, Alice said, "That looks a bit like you."

"I know!"

"Strange."

Her frown still present, Ayaka began reading out the text on the facing page. " _Yume to Shiriseba._ "

"Ah, yes, If I'd Known It Was a Dream," Alice said a touch wistfully, her prior confusion now nowhere to be seen. "One of the What Ifs of his career."

"That title sounds vaguely familiar... from an old poem, isn't it?"

"I'm not sure. I'm not a classical Japanophile, so I'd only heard of it here." Alice gestured at the book. "It was to have been an exploration of questions of identity and empathy, literally walking in someone else's shoes via body-swapping. Going beyond cheap comedy and seeking to examine how these dreams would affect the environment and people around them."

Ayaka froze in place.

This was hitting a little too close to home. There were too many things she wanted to say about the whole shebang, and she wasn't sure what she could actually say.

Eventually, she managed to utter a noncommittal "Sounds like it would have been quite interesting."

"Eh…" Alice sounded hesitant. "I'm a big fan of Shinkai's, but frankly, if you want intellectual rigour, you'd be better off looking elsewhere."

"If you say so. What happened?"

"Who knows?" Alice shrugged. "The official word is that he couldn't figure out how to make it work, conjure a vital spark to make it come to life in a satisfactory way, transcend the cliches that come up whenever Freaky Friday enters the picture. There was allegedly something always at the back of his mind that kept slipping away when he tried to put it down in writing, so he eventually was forced to let it lie fallow and move on."

Ayaka looked at the strokes which put her in mind of Fafnir. "Maybe what he needed was a natural disaster angle."

"Huh?" Alice stared at her funny.

"2014, the Great Tohoku Earthquake would still have been fresh on the minds of the Japanese," Ayaka said, her voice small and distant. "Maybe what he needed was a quest to avert a disaster, come out of nowhere as a twist. Maybe one of the protagonists had, unknown to audience and the other alike, already been killed in the disaster and the other has to find a way to make things right rather than simply accept the loss and walk away."

After all, if Uileag had simply been content to let things be back then, things would have been very different now, wouldn't they?

"I guess that could work? It certainly sounds like something he might come up with." Alice turned back to the pile of cases and picked up a steelbook, which she passed to Ayaka before heading to the fridge in the room. "Anyway, Cel-Love! Keit-Ai in the original Japanese, if you prefer."

Ayaka studied the front cover, which depicted a boy and girl looking at each other, separated by some kind of fuzzy, glowing break in reality.

"Shinkai's seventh film, the one that finally made him an international mainstream figure with an Oscar nomination rather than just an otaku darling," Alice said as she pulled a bag of ice cream tubs out of the fridge, retrieved the rest of the pile of disc cases, and led Ayaka off. "A boy is given the phone number of his crush and she accepts his confession. When he sees her the next day, though, she apparently doesn't know what he's talking about. As he later learns from 'her', neither did 'he'. They find out that they're talking across universes and start trying to help each other become an item with their own universe's selves."

"... Huh."

"Yeah, almost everyone says that when they first hear about it. It's easier to follow than it sounds, though. He's got a knack for making things understandable. Too bad the JSDF has dragooned him and CoMix Wave Films into doing propaganda and public service films right now; we were waiting for his eighth proper film, which was on track for this year before all this nastiness started. Next year, hopefully." She pushed open the door to a briefing room which already had a few occupants, then paused abruptly, a look of dawning comprehension on her face. "Oh, so that's what it was!"

"Eh?"

"I've been wondering ever since we first met why you sounded a bit familiar, and it finally clicked. You sound like one of the voice actresses in Shinkai's body of work."

Ayaka could only stare confusedly as Alice went in, and hurried to follow before the door closed.

"Make yourself at home! I need to set everything up first. Help yourself to the ice cream. Someone else will bring drinks and more solid snacks if you'd prefer something with bite to it instead."

Ayaka handed the steelbook back, took a tub and a spoon for herself, then headed to pick a seat before pausing at a sight. "Why the tissue boxes?"

"You're going to need them," Alice said enigmatically.

===[===]===

The only thing that could be heard as the credits rolled was a roomful of openly weeping viewers.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: "Stingray" design, including her theme, courtesy of GBscientist, who also made a number of valuable suggestions for this chapter. Many thanks, mate!

This is not an actual Mage crossover; the magic system is flavoured by such, but purists will clearly see that it's a fluffy mash of Ascension and Awakening rather than using the full crunch of either system - hard and fast dot ratings for one - and is not meant to have calc-friendly, playable rigour.

Who would the Ducks main in Overwatch?

Forgot to mention it earlier, but Ayaka's boss is a NBA reference - Charles (Barkley) S(haq) (Michael) Jordan.


	11. Chapter 10

Authors' Notes: Sorry, folks, no special Christmas chapter. It's not the right time in-universe anyway. SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity users got a sneak proofread/preview at a Merry Christmas with a hastily cobbled-together piece of "WTF is your worldbuilding smoking, you two idiots"! AO3 and users, you'll have to settle for a New Year's greeting. :/

===[===]===

CHAPTER 10

===[===]===

End May 2023

===[===]===

The end of May saw the completion of the compressed OCS class and the candidates' official recommissioning.

"I finally understand why no one likes Full Dress," someone had muttered, and Ayaka had found herself agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment.

There weren't a lot of guests in attendance at the ceremony, but given how the shipgirl numbers skewed towards Summoned/Manifested, that wasn't a surprise. That said, solemnity of the occasion notwithstanding…

Ichiyo frowned as she peered up and up and up at the giant beanstalk, Ayaka's new lieutenant commander's shoulder boards in hand.

"Gran, do you think anyone will mind if I squat so you can reach?" Ayaka asked.

"I can do it, Mother," Yoshimichi said.

"It's fine, Mr Godai. I've got it." Gail Salazar Ramone, the perpetually harried-looking youngish dark green-haired Latina BERND aide assigned to Ichiyo, said as she piggybacked the older woman up into reach. The sight made Ayaka fight a losing battle against giggling.

"We should have gotten Mr Coventry or Dr Mysterio to come along," Ichiyo said as she put the shoulder boards on. "They are much better-equipped to do this."

"Ronald and Esteban weren't free, Ma'am," Gail replied.

"What a shame."

The freshly recommissioned officers were given the Memorial Day weekend off. For Ayaka, that meant a lot of rushing around. Moving out of her apartment to dump nonessential stuff back in the family home, meeting Hitomi and Morrie and other friends, putting a great many things in order.

Oh, and checking in on Uileag, of course. He had finally been medically cleared for the next CEC class.

{My Hero Academia Original Soundtrack - Lunch Break Song}

YouTube watch?v=T_PUlOkouho

"Not looking forward to it?" Ayaka asked over dinner.

"No," Uileag admitted, "not just because of what happened the last time."

He had finally received the Navy Cross along with a Purple Heart, but as it had been during the OCS month, Ayaka hadn't been able to witness it getting pinned on him.

"You're going to be fine," Ayaka said.

"You sound very sure of that."

"I might have cheated and did some divination?" Ayaka said with a nervous chuckle and pull at her sidelocks.

"For shame, how unbecoming!" Uileag exclaimed in mock outrage.

Ayaka pouted.

"In all frankness, since you outrank me now, do I need to salute and call you Ma'am?"

Ayaka sucked in a horrified breath. "Please don't!"

Uileag laughed. "Okay, I won't. Has anyone ever told you how cute you are when you're frantic like that?" He reached across the table and squeezed her cheeks.

"You, plenty of times," she said stonily.

Speaking of things, she had to fight down a sudden atavistic urge to get something else squeezed, a feeling she noted she had been getting more often after her Reawakening. No, that sort of thing came after the wedding!

"Hmm? What was that last bit?"

Oh, did she accidentally say something aloud?! "Nothing!"

"Talking about the wedding, though, I'm surprised Athair and Gran actually managed to agree on a date. I'm shocked and amazed. Shocked and amazed for real."

"I know! I was afraid they would just squabble for weeks and weeks."

"September 3rd this year, was it?"

"Yes, September 3rd. For the numerology, Gran says. The Labor Day weekend… probably didn't hurt."

"Only 3 months? That's not a lot of time to prepare." Uileag looked worried.

"I'll trust Gran to make it work." When Uileag still looked unconvinced, she frowned at him.

"I guess," Uileag said noncommittally. "Hopefully I can get posted to a nearby assignment after my course is over. Take care of yourself out there, Ayachi. I know you're not squishy like me… er, squish… er, never mind. You know what I mean." He scratched the back of his neck nervously.

"Yes, I know what you meant." Ayaka giggled. "Thanks, Uiui."

Uileag saw her back to the Shirokaze home and tightly embraced her; Ayaka did him one better by stooping to give a parting kiss.

The next working day, the recommissionees gathered at JB MDL once more to board the planes taking them to their respective assignments.

Next stop: Naval Station Everett.

===[===]===

It wasn't a straight shot to NAVSTA Everett. JB MDL's default transport aircraft was the C-130 Hercules operated by the reservists of VR-64, but the priority need meant a C-40 Clipper from NAS Whidbey Island's VR-61 had been sent for them instead. There just weren't enough Skyrangers available to spare for a transport, not when any of each might be called into action at the drop of a hat.

The ride could have been worse, frankly. Ayaka had been expecting all the seats to be cramped together as closely as possible in order to maximise capacity, but on hindsight, since the class had been divided up across the bases, there had been no need for that.

Ayaka stared hesitantly at the other shipgirls, who had promptly taken off their footwear, used their engineering sections to rig a row's worth of seatbelts into a harness and then proceeded to conk out. "I'm not sure this is a good idea," she said to herself.

When the loadmaster walked through the passenger cabin some time later and, after looking around at the others, gave her a quizzical look at still sitting upright, she reluctantly followed suit.

There was a reception committee waiting when they disembarked. Okay, maybe "committee" was a bit generous. There were just two of them, both shipgirls.

Yorktown, CV-5, was a short-haired blonde with a Y-shaped blue barrette and blue eyes. A sharply-pressed blue beret rested on her head. She wore a sleeveless, cleavage- and midriff-baring white sailor blouse with a blue collar and red necktie, white elbow gloves and a belted blue miniskirt with white and red trim. Black thighhighs with gold pinstriping that ended in the letters "YKTN" and grey camouflage knee boots completed the outfit.

Practically clinging to her, eyes suspiciously scanning the newcomers, was Hammann, DD-412. She had long white hair and blue eyes with, incongruously, cat ears. She had a red and black bow on the top of her head. Her outfit was a monochrome maid uniform except for an Old Glory scarf. For legwear she had black thighhighs and grey camouflage knee boots.

"MDL class of May '23?" Yorktown asked after squinting at a tablet and counting off from a list.

"Yes, Ma'am," Ayaka and the rest of the newcomers said.

"Follow us. Your luggage will get taken separately to the dorms." She led the way to a truck and they piled in, which then led to Clinton Pier and a ferry in which they crossed Possession Sound to reach Everett proper. After clearing security, they were led to an already-occupied auditorium, mostly filled with other shipgirls but with a few conventional sailors too, including a bunch seated at or near the computer at the front.

"We're still waiting for the San Diego class before the construct CO's welcome," Yorktown said. "Please be seated."

The bunch found a few empty seats and put their butts down, after which Yorktown and Hammann left. It would be a while later before they returned, another group of shipgirls in tow.

"Where are they?" Ayaka thought she heard Yorktown ask, frowning. "Hammann, try again to contact-"

{My Hero Academia Original Soundtrack - Rampaging Evil}

YouTube watch?v=0JRgZH6AwB8

"Sorry we're late!" The voices of a bunch of young girls filled the air shortly after the doors to the auditorium were shoved open in a hurry. "Sorry we're-WHHHOOOOOAAAAAAA-"

The one in the lead was a stumpy redhead with thick round rimless glasses wearing her short hair in twin buns with a heart-shaped _ahoge._ Her outfit was almost a twin to O'Bannon's but for white thighhighs instead of black pantyhose. It was her who tripped over something and pitched forward, starting to fall down the auditorium stairs, arms flailing desperately.

Resisting a sudden chill that inexplicably shot down her spine at the sight of the shipgirl, Ayaka willed an image of sand shifting, flowing upwards in an hourglass into existence in her mind, even as a small voice said that the tests when there was no pressure involved were easy, but this was a different kettle of fish.

Biting down on the doubt, Ayaka rose from her seat, forcing herself to ignore the wince-inducing crunching sound as the fallen smashed a dent in the stairs with her forehead and continued to tumble.

Fingers moving as if to unmake a braid.

Her surroundings became fuzzy with a green tint.

Twirl counterclockwise.

Everything froze for a moment.

Left hand, spin counterclockwise.

As her hand spun, time began to rewind. The people who had been rising from their seats after finally getting over their surprise sat back down. The falling shipgirl reversed her fall, floating back up the stairs, the smashed step repairing itself, until she undid her trip, found her footing again and was walking backwards with the rest of the incoming shipgirls out of the auditorium, the door closing behind them.

Ayaka's hand stopped turning even as she settled back in her seat, but she looked in the direction of the doors.

The doors burst open.

"Sorry we're-WHHH-"

Weaving motions.

The surroundings started to fuzz over.

Double time hand signal.

"-OOOOOOOOOO-"

The shipgirl began to tumble in slow motion even as Ayaka rose from her seat at normal speed and, brows furrowed as she Willed, Stepped up the stairs and caught the shipgirl with both hands, left foot lunged forward for stability, before she went down the stairs.

"I've got you!"

"-A-mmph."

The shipgirl made a few confused sounds at getting her fall cushioned by something soft.

"You're going to be fine," Ayaka said. "You're-"

The shipgirl extricated herself from the muffling, blearily looked up at her saviour.

She promptly started screaming.

"AAAHHHHHHH!"

She Stepped down into a seat and flailed as she nearly fell over again, but was caught by her comrades and helped into a seated position without further incident.

As Ayaka returned to her seat, staring after the other shipgirl's panicked escape, it finally sunk in for her who she had just saved.

William D. Porter, DD-579.

She was suddenly aware that she was trembling.

"Willie, get a grip!" Yorktown snapped, her voice lined with Command, and Willie snapped to seated attention. Everyone else fell silent and sat up straight.

As if on cue, the door swung open again shortly afterwards.

"Officer on deck!" Multiple voices announced, and the room rose to its feet.

{Ace Combat 6 Original Soundtrack - Briefing 1}

YouTube watch?v=909truPDCGc

Construct Three CO, RDML Paris Abel, was a brown-haired, brown-eyed woman with sharp, almost harsh features.

"As you were."

The room sat back down.

"Ladies and gentlemen. We're here to welcome our new hands to Construct Three, NAVENSCIWARCOM, operating out of NAVSTA Everett. For those who are unaware, we are one of the United States Navy's contributions to the Pacific Protectorate of the global extradimensional entity combat project Task Force VALKYRIE."

The lieutenant at the computer clicked a world map into life, one that zoomed in on the Pacific Ocean.

"As the name suggests, the Pacific Protectorate is the division of TFV that operates in the Pacific region. The other primary contributing nations are Australia, China, Japan and Russia. Our construct's area of operations in particular is the North Pacific, including Japan."

The map highlighted the named nations and the AO.

"In the current situation, the majority of the responsibility for anti-abyssal operation falls on us. China and Russia," the two nations flashed on the map, "lack substantial numbers of enlightened operatives."

Based on what was currently known, the shipgirls that returned were almost entirely from the World Wars, with a minority of those older than that and even fewer who were younger. China's had been modest and had induced a fair bit of squabbling with Taiwan, who were technically the rightful owners as the Republic of China from back then. As for Russia, its fleet back then hadn't been tiny _per se_ , but it wasn't the juggernaut it would develop into in the Cold War, and the loaned or prize ships had defaulted to their original allegiances, with not many being loaned back out again. This meant quite an unfavourable shipgirl-to-sea coverage ratio.

"Combined with the losses from the Week of Blood, this means they currently have limited ability to operate far from shore and have chosen to focus on local provision and fortification over producing for export.

"Australia faces similar issues." The map highlighted it now. "Resource-wise, they are mostly self-sufficient, but high abyssal activity in the South Pacific," the Pacific Island chains turned red, eliciting a shudder from the shipgirls whose past lives had seen fighting in the Solomons and the island-hopping campaigns, "has largely restricted them to acting as a hub for the defence of New Zealand and the remains of Indonesia, with limited capacity for long-range operations.

"That leaves Japan." The island nation flashed. "Japan has had the proportionate highest number of returning shipgirls, but its dependence on food and strategic resource imports is a bottleneck on operations. Hypertech-enabled designation for Chinese antiship missiles has made significant contributions in their defence, and that is a rare statement," a few of the sailors made muffled chuckles at this, "but they cannot keep it up forever by themselves.

"That is the current state of affairs; your respective amalgams will now brief you on your detailed duties."

"You lot," Yorktown said, pointing at Ayaka and some other newcomers, not all of whom were from her MDL class, "with us."

===[===]===

Yorktown led them to a briefing room, a bunch of other shipgirls falling in line behind.

"Ladies, welcome to Amalgam 55."

The construct's Heavy Escort Amalgam was designated Uatu, commanding officer CAPT George Zelben. Dark-haired and -eyed with soft, vaguely Eastern European features, Ayaka thought he looked like he belonged more on the set of a film rather than in the navy.

"Element leaders, you've already had the chance to look over the newcomers' dossiers and discuss assignments. We'll give you a few minutes to introduce the new hands while we set up."

"Sir."

Thus acknowledged, he headed over to the terminal to speak with his staff.

"Iowa, over here," Yorktown said.

Ayaka padded over, acutely aware of Willie seated near the proffered place, trying her best not to make eye contact.

"Congratulations, FNG. Uatu One has been needing a XO, and it looks like you're it!" Yorktown slapped her on the back.

Wait what

Ayaka tried to suppress a reflexive startled squeak; she did manage to cut it down to a "ehhh?"

"I need someone who can keep up with the rest of the element without Stepping or needing to run Procedures, and neither of our existing battleships fit the bill. No offence, Mary!"

"Huh?" Another shipgirl, one with short black hair, a white hairband and blue eyes, shook herself. "Oh. Sorry. None taken, Yorktown," she gently replied.

"Ma'am, I would like to request reassignment to a different element," Willie said.

"Your request is noted and denied, One-Four."

Willie almost but didn't entirely succeed in hiding a frown.

Uatu Two's leader was Essex, CV-9. She was very tall, only a bit shorter than Ayaka. She had very pale blue, almost white hair tied in twintails and red eyes. Right now she wasn't emoting much. She wore a black and red tunic, a black capelet, a white miniskirt and black pantyhose. The capelet had the number nine on it.

"What?! What?!"

Oh, and there was a bald eagle squawking from its perch on her left shoulder. Well, whatever one called a majestic bird of prey's counterpart to a parrot's squawking.

"Bell…" Essex said chidingly. "Sorry. Bell McCamp can be a boor."

Ayaka stared for a moment before shaking her head. She supposed a talking bald eagle for a familiar made just as much sense as anything else she'd seen so far.

Essex's XO was West Virginia, BB-48. Ayaka knew there were certain circles that regarded American battleships starting from the Standards on as cousins; if she took that interpretation at face value, then West Virginia would probably be the closest-looking to herself, never mind the age gap of their past lives. The _Colorado_ -class battleship had brown, almost purple eyes and long brown hair worn in a half updo with a white ribbon. Of course, she was noticeably shorter and more obviously white, which did put a cramp on the similarities. She wore a crimson jacket with white-cuffed puffy long sleeves over a white blouse with blue ribbon, a knee-length crimson skirt with black lace underlayer, black pantyhose and crimson shoes.

Her gaze was piercing, and Ayaka felt like she had been scanned by radar, even though her warning receiver hadn't lit up the slightest. It did make her wonder, though, whether it was possible to hang an acceleration onto an automatic knowing/unveiling "ping" so she wouldn't have to rely on slow natural reflexes, the better to avoid being caught by surprise.

Princeton, CVL-23, led Uatu Three. She was another short-haired, blue-eyed blonde. Unlike Yorktown, she was dressed like a magician. She wore white bunny ears. Above a red leotard went a white blouse, red bowtie and black coat. A black cane, a black top hat with a red band and red shoes completed the outfit.

"At Princeton, ours is the cause of education, and under God's light we flourish. Set an abyssal a fire, it's warm for a night. Set an abyssal afire, it's warm for the rest of its life!"

The light carrier began laughing maniacally, and Ayaka and the other newcomers took a few discreet steps away from her.

Her XO in turn, the former acting exec for Uatu One, was Maryland, BB-46. Ayaka had caught a glimpse when Yorktown had addressed her earlier, but now she took a closer look. The shipgirl wore a purple dress with white-cuffed puffy long sleeves that went down to shin level. It had a white collar like a Pilgrim's, closed with a blue ribbon. It wasn't possible to tell from a look where the black heeled riding boots she wore reached up to.

She seemed a little spacey, her gaze not all there.

"Alright, shall we begin?" Zelben asked once the introductions died down. There was a world map projected on the screen in front, similar to the one Admiral Abel had shown.

"Sir." The shipgirls that were still standing found seats.

"Welcome to Uatu. We're the Heavy Escort Amalgam of the construct. New hands, have you been told what our mission is?"

"Escorting trans-Pacific convoys, Sir."

"Correct." The LT at the computer clicked on, and the map onscreen zoomed into the Pacific, then sprung a dashed line heading north along the British Columbia coast up to Alaska, west across the Bering Sea into Russian waters and going south to Japan. "The rest of you have heard this before, so just take it as a refresher."

"Stu-stupid pervert commander, I don't need a refresher or anything like that," Hammann said.

Yorktown silently rapped her on the back of the head with her knuckles.

Zelben continued without the slightest sign of being perturbed by the byplay. "As Admiral Abel has covered just now, Chinese and Russian losses mean they currently lack the spare capacity to protect shipping, which is where we need to come in.

"Now, the plan is simple. Basing out of the _Tripoli_ , you will serve as close escort for the bulk carriers and container ships all the way to Japan. Amalgam 451 will act as a covering force alongside Royal Canadian Navy assets up until you hit the Bering; after that, protection of the cargo ships will be solely on you until you get close enough to Russian waters for maritime patrol support. Once you reach the Kurils, JMSDF shipgirls will provide covering force as the freighters split off to their designated receiver ports. Your mission will terminate at Fleet Activities Yokosuka, and you'll move between these two bases along with the convoy.

"In addition, as the primary enlightened assets in the 7th Fleet's AO, you will be called on to provide all necessary assistance for anti-abyssal multilateral operations within the West Pacific region. This state of affairs is likely to persist until the command attains sufficient strength to permanently forward-deploy a dedicated amalgam or even construct to Yokosuka.

"The primary threat vector will come from the Bering." The map changed to a false-colour weather display, with the Bering coloured discordantly. "Ever since the Week of Blood, almost the whole area has been covered in some kind of fog so thick it makes 2000s Beijing look like a exemplar of clean air. Optical, infrared, radar, conventional methods of standoff surveillance can't penetrate far, and trying to send UAVs in for close reconnaissance gets them summarily shot down before they can gather any actionable intel. Attempting to bombard whatever abyssal facilities are within has thus been written off by both us and the Russians. Futurecasting also gives baneful warnings when the question of assaulting whatever's within comes up. As a result, we've been limited to evacuating the coastline and suppressing anything that tries to make landfall. You'll need to guard the freight from abyssal commerce raiders. Yorktown, bear in mind that due to recent changes to coastal defence requirements following New York, we cannot, repeat, cannot guarantee Shockwave support."

There was a bit of grumbling in the room at that; Ayaka thought she could make out "fucking politicians" through the coughing. Yorktown herself merely said, "Copy that, Sir."

"Questions?"

"Sir," one of the newcomers asked, "why are the Russians unable to cover us the whole way? According to the history books, they didn't have any qualms about flying within missile range of Anchorage during the Cold War."

"Officially, coastal defence requirements." Zelben's face twisted, showing what he thought of that particular excuse. "Unofficially, Admiral Zeleska says there's a whole mess of political complexities that need ironing out."

"Sir," another said, "with all due respect, why not just dash through the North Pacific? Start at San Diego," she raised her right hand and pointed at the map, made a circle before swiping it to the left, "waypoint at Pearl," she made another circle and another leftward swipe, "and then straight to Japan? I mean, if we've managed to retake Hawaii, then there shouldn't be a viable threat vector from Johnston or Midway."

"A good question. WeeVee?"

West Virginia nodded. "Sir. Johnston and Midway may be presently free of abyssal presence, but given the fluidity of abyssal deployments, we cannot count on their not suddenly re-establishing facilities on the said atolls or otherwise remaining unmolested across that vast, undefended expanse of ocean, even with long-loiter bomber support. Modern cargo ships may have a flank that beats Mary and I, but designs have lately been optimised for low-speed operation and fuel economy; it has only been in the most recent years that breakthroughs in letting economy and speed coexist have been made, and the merchant marine has been slow to make the higher initial outlays that the new technology demands. There remains a shortage of high-speed transports to make the run worthwhile."

"Indeed," Zelben said. "Iowa, that's why you're with us rather than at San Diego and your old hull under RADM Adams. Hopefully, by the time your sisters are back with us, we'll have enough capacity to run this route too."

"Y-yes, Sir," Ayaka said, surprised by her name suddenly coming up and, she had to admit, the existential question of her old hull she hadn't really been putting much thought into. She did know the loaning out of her rigging and fairies had helped accelerate the recreation of the equipment and retraining of the veterans.

"Any further questions?" When none came, Zelben said, "Very good. Element leaders will take over now and carry out tactical briefs. We'll spend today and tomorrow working up as the next run of the convoy will only be ready the day after that. Dismissed!"

===[===]===


	12. Chapter 11

Authors' Notes: Not too inspired this time… :(

Apologies to AO3 and FF dot Net readers for the delay. Was waiting for art to be finished before uploading it.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 11

===[===]===

"Please contact me as soon as you reach!" Uileag said over the phone.

"Yes, Uiui."

"Don't lose anything to frostbite!"

"Yes, Uiui, I did remember to pack cold-weather gear."

"And remember to take some photos of polar bears if you see any!"

Ayaka sighed.

===[===]===

{The Place Promised in Our Early Days Original Soundtrack - Plan of the Two}

YouTube watch?v=axWAddjbdQc

It was 0500 sharp PDT when Amalgam 55 gathered at the piers of NAVSTA Everett. They had already "checked in" their luggage on board the _Tripoli_ the night before.

They were now doing final checks in preparation for setting off with the imminent dawn, that the carriers might be able to roll their combat air patrols. Until the problems with detecting abyssals were fixed, it remained up to shipgirl aviation to provide warning of an incoming abyssal air raid. Yorktown had been operationally tight-lipped and Essex simply quiet, but between Bell and Princeton, Ayaka had learnt that with the tasking requirements, Saratoga hadn't had much chance to run night carrier operations classes, which meant that particular capability was taking a while to disseminate.

Ayaka looked up at the bulk carriers and containerships they were supposed to be shepherding, her hair and braided cord billowing in the predawn wind. The ungainly Capesize monstrosities, every last one displacing more than her previous body, were being towed into formation by comparatively tiny tugboats. They had undergone a variety of hasty retrofits: camouflage, radar and sonar absorbent material and paint, missile emplacements either in cell launchers or TFV-licensed Club-K derivatives.

All this, she knew, would ultimately be delaying the inevitable without adequate shipgirl escort.

"Iowa?"

Ayaka turned to regard a shipgirl with aqua eyes and pink hair tied in twintails with her bangs in a topknot. Her outfit was almost the same as Vulcan's except for coal stains, wearing the necktie like a bowtie and the name on the pinafore: Vestal, AR-4. "Yes?"

"You're overdressed."

"I am?" Ayaka looked down at the winter wear she had put on over her outfit in preparation for heading north towards the Arctic Circle.

"Yup!" Vestal cast an arm out and Ayaka's gaze followed the path it described, looking over the gathered shipgirls both of 55 and 451. "Notice anything?"

Ayaka frowned. "Only some of us are appropriately attired for cold weather."

"Appropriately? Nah. Look again."

The ones in question, Ayaka realised, were Johnny-come-lately Natural Borns like herself.

"I know the frails say us Sierra Mikes don't know how to human, but you November Bravos sometimes forget you're ships too. Trust me, you don't need all that. Princeton!"

"Yes! Vestie! How might us at the Bubble assist you today?!" The magician shipgirl said, waving cheerily.

"Iowa here doesn't need her winter wear, right?"

"No! Unless Stingray bungled the ratings, you're not one of those so poor at Forceworking you have to rely on adjusting heat rather than controlling it, are you?"

"No."

"Exactly. Now hand them over!"

"You're not going to burn them, are you?" Ayaka asked nervously.

"No, just send them back to your bunk."

Still not entirely convinced, Ayaka reluctantly took off the beanie, coat, gloves, mufflers and scarf and handed them over to Princeton, who stuffed it into her top hat, then went over to the rest of the Natural Borns and got them to stow the extraneous garb away, leaving only a few fellows still clad as such.

"Don't worry, you're going to be fine!" Vestal said, clapping her on the back.

"I hope so."

"Uatu, gather!" Yorktown shouted shortly afterwards, and the amalgam formed up before CAPT Zelben in short order, the amalgam's CO and command staff having shown up to witness their departure. "Number off! One-One!"

"One-Two!"

"One-Three!"

"One-Four…."

After ensuring that all hands were present and accounted for, Yorktown deferred to the CO. Zelben passed his coffee mug to his XO before saying, "Now, I'll just briefly remind you of the plan. We'll be all hands on deck along with Looking Glass for the first watch." He inclined his head towards Amalgam 451, who were gathered some distance away doing their own pre-sortie final briefings. Their CO nodded, while Looking Glass One-One gave a thumbs up.

"After that, we'll go to standard watch rostering. Uatu One and Looking Glass One will take the second watch, meaning you'll be doing two watches in a row. RCN enlightened forces from CFB Esquimalt will link up with us near the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. As close escort force, Yorktown, you'll have tactical command. Once you leave our waters, TFV communication will go through Overlord. Questions?"

There were none.

Zelben looked over to 451 and got a second round of affirmatives.

"Alright. Let's make it another casualty-free operation, ladies. We'll see you when you get back."

He saluted and Uatu returned it. Reclaiming his mug from his XO, he left for the base operations room with his staff and that of the other amalgam.

Loud foghorns split the air as the freighters began moving under their own power.

"Amalgam 55, Uatu-"

"Amalgam 451, Looking Glass-"

"-sortieing!"

With a running start, the amalgams leapt off the pier onto the water. Riggings unfolded in a chaotic-seeming whir of clicking and snapping parts as they splashed down, and they split off into their respective elements.

===[===]===

About 10 hours later

===[===]===

The mid-afternoon sun shone as Essex and Looking Glass Two-One sailed into position a safe distance ahead of the cargo transports, their members in tow, and saluted. "Uatu One, Looking Glass One, we are your relief."

Yorktown and Looking Glass One returned the salutes. "Uatu Two, Looking Glass Two, we stand relieved."

"Alright, girls!" Hamman suddenly said after the arms came down. "You know what to do!"

No, actually, Ayaka didn't, though she noticed that Essex had pulled a recorder from somewhere and that West Virginia had started to twitch despite doing her best to maintain the neutral look that poorly hid the glare threatening to surface when she looked on certain persons. Most of the others seemed excited, with the destroyers practically vibrating.

"A one, a two, a one two three!"

Accompanied by the recorder, most of the shipgirls present started singing with varying degrees of onkeyedness, and Ayaka instantly understood the reason for West Virginia's consternation.

{John Denver - Take Me Home, Country Roads}

YouTube watch?v=1vrEljMfXYo

"Almost Heaven

West Virginia

Blue ridge mountains

Shedenoah river"

It was a very familiar song.

"Life is old there

Older than the trees

Younger than the mountains

Blowing like the breeze

"Country roads

Take me home

To the place I belong

West Virginia

Mountain mama

Take me home

Country roads…"

===[===]===

"FNG, with me after we're done with resupply! Let's continue your training on what it means to be an XO. The rest of you are dismissed till our next watch."

The _Tripoli_ and her sisters were designed to support the logistical needs of a Marine Expeditionary Unit; it was more than equal to the task of feeding the amalgam.

The meal hadn't been very big given that no one had taken damage, expended any ammunition or did any heavy procedure-enactment. Ayaka was still full from what felt like too much nevertheless, the taste of key lime pie still on her lips, when Yorktown proceeded to lead her to the shipboard office and subject her to gruelling hours of instruction, including on the forms and procedures like enemy contact that she wasn't needing just yet. Afterwards, she found herself heading towards the nearest lounge, mind still churning a little too furiously to go to sleep yet.

There was a whip-cracking sound, loud even through the hull, followed swiftly by the susurration of falling rain.

Ayaka paused in her tracks and massaged her brows with a hand, fighting the urge to sigh. She knew intellectually that the combination of control heat and unseen shield could negate the chill of rainfall or other adverse weather; Stingray had taught the class that the first time the skies had opened over them. Beyond that, shipgirls were innately resistant to weather that normal humans would find adverse. That didn't make deliberately heading into a cold region without bothering with the appropriate garments any less counterintuitive.

Vestal was right; she wasn't much good at this thinking like a ship thing.

When she reached the nearest lounge, a sight made her halt again, this time at the doorway.

{Your Lie in April Original Soundtrack - Mother's Dream}

YouTube watch?v=qAGtSKcYhv4

Despite the time of day, the room was crowded, sailors and a few shipgirls chattering loudly. Some people were huddled around a table, some card game in progress. As she watched, one slapped her hand down on the table and the group in question broke out in riotous laughter.

That wasn't what made her halt.

What made her halt was that, for no reason she could think of, the only empty seat was next to Willie, who was seated on a couch with drink in hand staring at a wall. As she approached, Willie turned to look at her.

"Go away," Willie said softly, not meeting Ayaka's eyes in a way that wasn't due to the height discrepancy. "I don't want to again do anything that might accidentally hurt you." She turned back to her intent study of the wall without waiting for a reply, radiating some kind of prickly feeling that was simultaneously lonely yet repellent. It might have been a trick of the light, but the sailors nearest to her had seemed to inch away when she had spoken.

There was a long pause while Ayaka tried to think of something to say to that. Unable to come up with something, she turned to leave, only to stop at the doorway again.

Maybe if she…?

Ayaka was glad there wasn't anyone trying to enter this lounge at the moment, because her face quickly grew increasingly contorted by how trying to divine Willie's response to what she might do only got her increasingly Rube Goldbergian results.

After leaving the lounge, she decided to head back to the officer berthing compartments and get some sleep in before the next watch.

Even with the sit-up racks, it was still a tight fit. Most standard accommodation didn't cater for basketballers or giant beanstalks. That wasn't the reason she had difficulty falling asleep, though.

She couldn't stop thinking about Willie sitting in the lounge. The kind of haunted expression she had been wearing, it didn't belong on a child.

That said, it wasn't the whole picture, the sole reason for Ayaka's unease.

There was something else undefinable plaguing her about the other shipgirl beyond who she was. Something she couldn't place, something tantalisingly out of reach, silently taunting and tormenting her.

Her sleep was fitful.

===[===]===

A few days later

===[===]===

"One, Four, got something on my hydrophones."

"Three, I confirm."

{Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception Original Soundtrack - Unknown 1}

YouTube watch?v=-ZGvyyscdb4

"We're on the grind at last?" Princeton started to smile despite the downpour, even as a wave scattered around her untouchable and what little didn't get diverted broke harmlessly against the unseen shield beneath.

The convoy had come out of the first rainfall in time to pass Vargas Island, for what little view there was to be had. Water and greenery had been their constant companions as they had headed north, turning west once they hit the Gulf of Alaska. They had run into a new, massive storm front once they neared Kodiak Island, and it was this they were weathering now.

"Predictable! So predictable, waiting for us to be too far away for Looking Glass or the Canucks to turn back in time or zoomies scrambled from Elmendorf-Richardson or Whidbey to make it." She fished a set of cards out of a pocket, seemingly at random, and consulted them. "Uatu Three, confirm three contacts, Ka-class."

"Confirm."

"Affirmative."

"Aye, aye."

"Got that too."

"Two?"

Maryland looked up from a prayer. " _Deus vult_." There was no trace of her usual spaciness in her tone or eyes as she drew her lance with a simple, direct motion. "Let us crack their hulls like crabshells."

" _Dei sub numine viget_." Princeton's smile broadened into a vicious, toothy grin, then into full-blown cackling even as she began fishing in her top hat. "How about a magic trick?"

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Now, time to see if we have learnt anything at all from all that time spent binging Panopticon Quest to study military-grade Magery in action.

Will it work?

A: No.

B: Hell no.

C: Negative.

D: _Iie._


	13. Chapter 12

Authors' Notes: How do we even brevity code

How do we even write fights

===[===]===

CHAPTER 12

===[===]===

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

The escorts in Uatu Three produced depth charges and threw them to Princeton, who had them disappear into her hat with a flourish.

Did abyssals dream of oil-fired sheep? No one knew the answer to that question, because those weren't thoughts one had in battle and no one yet knew how to properly contain an abyssal taken "alive". As it was with shipgirls, so it was with their demonic foes; despite the occasional crack, all concerned knew very well that a highly-concentrated electrical current wasn't likely to work on something that magically melded human, ship and spirit. It wasn't like you could simply shoot off all the weapons, disable the engine, deploy boarders and Bob's your uncle like with a steel hull.

It was tempting to hope, though, that the three Ka-class submarines' response to depth charges knocking on their hulls was a horrified "OH SHI-"

Water exploded skywards in three great spouts.

{Ace Combat X2: Joint Assault Original Soundtrack - Linkage Remix 2}

YouTube watch?v=P263T511JF0

Princeton was on the radio even before the depth charges detonated. "Uatu Three-One, all ships, enemy contacted. General quarters, general quarters. All hands to battle stations."

Foghorns and shrieking klaxons filled the air as all the ships accelerated to flank speed and went to combat separation, dispersing southwards away from the fog bank and trying to push out of the storm. Sailors rushed to their stations, swiftly putting on anti-flash gear, while Uatu One and Two stomped hurriedly through _Tripoli_ 's passageways up to the main deck, lining up on both sides. A well deck would have been more appealing to their nautical instincts, but that kind of major structural refit wasn't in the cards anytime soon, and the sudden return to war and losses meant the US Navy was being forced to go with what they had rather than what they wanted.

"Uatu One, number off!" Yorktown shouted at the port side.

"Uatu Two, number off," Essex said at starboard.

"All members present and accounted for; deploying!" They Stepped off the deck and splashed down, rigging unfolding as they spread out on the north face of the convoy.

"Overlord," Princeton said while this was going on, "Uatu Three-One. Enemy contacted, requesting fire support."

"Uatu, Overlord, reading you five by five. Wait one… patching Uatu Actual in."

"Uatu, Uatu Actual," CAPT Zelben said. "Checking oranges. Wait one…" he looked over at the information being fed to the operations room, the data having been crunched by subordinates, and frowned. "Ongoing storm conditions at Elmendorf-Richardson and Whidbey. Support will be delayed. You are weapons free; eliminate all hostiles and secure the area."

"Uatu, Overlord. 326 TBAD is currently responding to another incursion and is unable to provide support."

"Duly noted. Shame the Reds had to send a flushogram and the zoomies had to fizzle. Eyes on targets?"

"Negative, Uatu, no joy. The storm is degrading Triton sensors; visual is a wash."

"And the rest still don't work right on abyssals. Duly noted. Uatu Three-One out." Switching to the unit channel, Princeton said, "Got that, girls? Going to take more than chair farce ineptitude to leave us hosed!"

"Copy that, Three-One," Yorktown said. "Uatu, align formation vector 345. Three-Five, Three-Six, southward security."

"Wilco, One-One." The two destroyers in question peeled off to guard the south flank.

"One-Two?"

Ayaka knew what Yorktown was asking, for it had come up during the planning: was it possible to accelerate the entire convoy? Even a mere doubled flank speed would be enough to leave the abyssal destroyers in the dust, never mind anything heavier.

Her fingers flew through the weaving motions, trying to form the imago, then shook her head. "Negative, One-One. Negative on power for that, and the Or Energy contributions needed will leave everyone dangerously low."

"The hard way, then!" Bell squawked redundantly. After the talking eagle, radio capability hadn't come as too much of a surprise.

"Tell me again why we can't gift shielding on planes so they can fly in inclement weather?" Someone asked.

"You can!" Princeton replied. "For a king's ransom in supernal bandwidth if you want to protect the whole wing. Right Yorkie?"

"Yes. Iteration tried early on. Even with my Prime boosts the returns on shielding an air wing aren't worth it."

"That's your answer! That's why Sexy only protects her big bird!"

Ayaka learnt then that it was possible for Essex's look and tone to get even flatter than it usually was. "Less talking, more launching." She tapped her flight deck, which she had raised in preparation while turning into the wind. Flight deck crew fairies in their myriad coloured jerseys popped out from within the deck and rushed into action where Bell had hopped onto it from her shoulder. Yellow-clad aircraft directors with matching lighted wands began guiding the eagle as he stalked over to the takeoff position, making sure he was properly spotted while the others fussed over the deck and bird, exchanged hand signals as they carried out well-practiced preflight inspections to make sure everything was in place.

Essex proceeded to pet the eagle, stroking his head and back gently. "Shielding ready." She made a raising gesture with her free hand and a blast deflector made of Force rose behind him, while he flexed and stretched control surfaces.

Princeton's cane began to glow and spark. "Three!" As one, she and a catapult officer fairy raised three fingers with their free hands. Bell began to glow.

"Two!" The hand came up again, two fingers raised. Bell spread his wings and braced.

"One!" One finger this time.

"Launching!"

{Kenny Logins - Danger Zone}

YouTube watch?v=siwpn14IE7E

Princeton and the catapult officer dropped into crouches and gestured, the former with her cane, and with a flare of light and a prolonged, cacophonous call the eagle blasted down and off Essex's flight deck like he had been flung by a physical catapult. Rising into the air like he was the namesake jet fighter, he soon disappeared from sight.

"Rochambeau, how copy?" he said shortly afterwards.

"Reading you five by five, Uatu Two-One-Alpha," Yorktown replied.

Bell's literal eagle eyes scanned the sky and quickly located the opposition. "Tally… 200 bandits, vector 010, angels 20! Fighter/dive bomber equal mix. 100 bandits, vector 350, 500! All torpedo bombers!"

"Pshaw, that's only three of Sexy's worth!" Princeton shouted.

"Never cared about losses from weather, these guys!" Punctuating Bell's words, a stray bolt of lightning set an abyssal plane on fire, causing it to fall from the sky, yet its fellows flew on undaunted. "Breaking contact!" He banked sharply and made tracks before any of the escorting fighters could come after him.

"Uatu, Tripoli Actual," _Tripoli_ 's CO said over the radio. "Birds affirm."

The escorting destroyers made similar affirmations about the status of their surface-to-air weapons and the slaved retrofits on board the cargo ships.

"Solid copy, Uatu is active," Yorktown replied as the amalgam's radars started seeking targets.

"Copy that, Uatu. Inform when green on raygun."

Time seemed to stretch as Uatu's fire-control radars clawed at the air, trying to get a good solution on the targets that their search radars knew were there even as the inclement weather fought them.

One by one, hesitant, pulsing tones turned solid.

"Tripoli Actual, Uatu, tracking, tracking, tracking!"

"Roger, Uatu. Birds away!"

Vertical Launch System cell covers and Club-K containers flew open and surface-to-air missiles came roaring out on columns of fire. Undaunted by the weather, they rose swiftly to where the amalgam's radars had picked out the targets and detonated, filling the air with many, many fast-moving pointy objects.

"Leakers! Leakers!"

In theory, at least. Hypertech sensors might let missiles take telemetry from shipgirls, but that didn't guarantee hits. Abyssal planes were so much smaller that they had a lot more wiggle room for shrapnel to hurtle harmlessly past, and reconfiguring blast fragmentation patterns on conventional weapons to compensate for abyssal plane sizes was still an ongoing endeavour. The buzz of the bandits was softer now, but it was by no means stilled, even through the storm.

Which was a good thing it wasn't purely up to conventional firepower, was it?

"Two-Three, your call," Yorktown said.

"All ships, Two-Three, time to silence these mosquitoes!" The pink-haired, black-clad light cruiser punched fingerless gloved fists together, a pulse of energy firing from her even as the two rings around each of her wrists began to spin.

"Roger, Oakland!"

"Affirm Three-Tango-Indias!"

Fairies rushed to swap ammunition loads. "Three-Tango-Indias affirm!"

"Standby… standby…"

The Type 3 (Ver Tanaka/Inoue) Shell was a rework of the old Imperial Japanese Navy _sanshikidan_ by the Japan Esoteric and Exotic Research Agency (JEXRA), the Japanese counterpart to Iteration. Two brilliant engineers surnamed Tanaka and Inoue had been vital in working with the shipgirls on the breakthroughs needed to turn the Type 3 into the high-altitude area saturation aircraft killer it had been supposed to be, rather than a pretty but harmless firework.

"All ships, fire at will!"

Considering the moniker of the second _Iowa_ , it was entirely appropriate that 16"/50 Mark 7s were the first to roar, to breathe flame that claimed abyssal planes, but they were swiftly joined by _Colorado_ -class 16"/45 Mark 8s lighting up the storm with eye-searing brightness.

Then the mass of 5"/38 Mark 12s joined in, and the raining sky turned into a hellscape almost certainly visible from orbital infrared.

"But we set FIRE… TO THE RAIN," Princeton sang, sounding somehow both maniacal and melodious at the same time. She didn't have any 5-inchers herself, but Forceworking was a wonderful thing, to let her hurl her own fireballs into the swarm, looking like a stop motion flamethrower as she swept it across the formation. Despite twisting and weaving in every way to try and throw off the shots, abyssal planes were consumed by steam, shrapnel, heat and flame and had the sky taken away from them in droves. More than a few were betrayed by the weapons they had meant to use on the forces of man.

The surviving abyssal bandits flew on nevertheless, filled with a heedlessness to the losses that only reaffirmed their inhumanity. One might even call it a sheer bloodyminded determination at least equal to any of the Imperial Japanese Special Attack Units, except for the fact that this would be an insult to those poor fanatical fools, for there was no deliberate human will driving it. Fighters and dive bombers swooped down from on high, spewing a storm of steel in the form of bomb and rocket and shell to bring death. The torpedo bombers, meanwhile, did their best impressions of sea skimmer missiles. Their small size only made hugging the waves easier than full-size planes ever had it, and against pure conventionals the drink can-sized air-launched torpedoes would have been too tiny to even think of hitting.

All that determined closing did was run them into a big, beautiful wall of 20 and 40 Mike Mike triple-A.

It wasn't flawless, of course. No one who wasn't blinded by Gilgamesh levels of arrogance would think so. Even the all-up Fast Carrier Task Forces of yore couldn't catch them all, and Amalgam 55 was having to fight sans air cover and with suboptimal SAM support. 300 planes running a mix up game would eventually roll enough successes to get people through. The amalgam ended up having to dance around near hits, close and numerous enough that some of them got shrapnel scratches from proximity detonations getting through their shielding. There were also a few scares where shrapnel slashed through the unarmoured hull of a freighter, but nothing vital had been hit, fortunately.

Then Bell called in once more, the skies cleared enough for him to brave them again.

"Rochambeau, sight 40 ships. BatDiv, one: Battleship, Ta-class, three. Light cruiser, Ho-class, one. Destroyer, I-class, 4. CruDesDiv, two: Heavy cruiser, Ri-class, six. Light cruiser, Ho-class, two. Destroyer, I-class, 8. TorDesDiv, two: Torpedo cruiser, Chi-class, four. Destroyer, I-class, 12."

The Ta-class battleships had long white hair and green eyes. The "women" wore a white short-sleeved sailor blouse with black collar, white cape under black pauldrons, panties and thighhigh boots. Their rigging was a ring of waist-mounted turrets.

The Ri-class heavy cruisers had short black hair and glowing aqua eyes. They wore black strapless bikinis, boots and small chitinous backpacks with gorgets. Two tubes extended from the backpack, each feeding into xenomorph cetacean cannon not unlike eyeless Is that they held in gauntleted hands.

Chi-class torpedo cruisers wore a bone white mask broken in such a way that it exposed a glowing aqua left eye, but otherwise did not hide their mouth or black hair. They wore sleeveless, midriff-baring grey bodysuits with high metal collars. Their left forearms were slotted into big gauntlets ending in a cannon and they rode something best described as a waterborne Segway with a riot/tower shield at the front, a xenomorph mouth at the bottom from which torpedo launchers protruded.

It was hard to describe a Ho-class light cruiser. The best one could probably say was that they looked like deformed grey cylinders with turrets on the top and sides, the upper body of a vaguely female mutant with long black hair sticking out of the bow Sadako-style.

Ayaka wasn't sure she heard the report right. "Say again! 40? I didn't get that large a welcoming committee when I Reawakened!"

"I don't know why you only got the short bus squadron!" Hammann snarled. "This is how they do things out here, even before we got your batch filling out our ranks!"

"One-Two, One-Five, clear the channel," Yorktown said.

"Uatu One-One, Tripoli Actual. Bulldogs affi-"

"Rochambeau!" Bell abruptly radioed in, seeing red-bordered ghostly banners pop up over the abyssals. "Alpha-Sierra, Alpha-Sierra, Alpha-Sierra!"

The abyssal planes must have managed to get targeting coordinates off or they missed scouts in the noise; radar warning receivers began to shriek unceasingly as the Tas and Ris opened fire, the air so filled with munitions that the whistling of the shells became a continuous shriek.

"All ships, One-One, abyssals are enacting Artillery Spotting," Yorktown said. "Two-One."

"Entropic/temporal projections…" Essex's head had lowered, but now it snapped up, directors almost visibly spinning at frightful speed in her eyes. "Ready." Her soft voice was now unyielding, even as she raised her twin pistol-cannons to firing position.

Yorktown's command rang with Clarity of Purpose. "Standby for hypercram. All ships… action."

{Furi Original Soundtrack - Danger 6:24}

YouTube watch?v=8QpUGCXwOks

A mild headache struck Ayaka, and her eyes widened as she was suddenly filled with knowledge.

Back in university, she had friends who liked playing _danmaku_ , something she had found herself utterly inept at. Bullet hell patterns seemed impenetrable.

Now, though? Now she not only could see the gaps in the enemy fire, she knew how to move to exploit them.

Turrets swang with wordless synchronisation onto desired bearings even as the convoy shifted into a pattern of movement that, if an uninformed viewer looked at without context, seemed erratic and random. Willworkers with the appropriate Spheres knew better, could see the method in the madness.

One green-bordered black holographic banner appeared over each battleship and cruiser shipgirl in the amalgam, showing Bell.

A second slotted into place under it, displaying one main battery.

A third followed, displaying a second main battery.

Artillery Spotting, online.

The amalgam's guns erupted in fire, meeting the abyssal shelling with their own high-volume firehose of steel.

Even the most meagre initiates into Fateworking could read existing weaknesses. More talented shipgirls like Essex could outright create them, even in complex patterns. What she could tear down, though, she could also build up. The amalgam's fire came in complex interlocking patterns probabilistically designed to simultaneously counterattack and maximise deflection or destruction of the shells hurtling towards them, clearing a path for the lumbering steel hulls.

It probably shouldn't have worked. This was something end-war fire control systems found almost impossible, and even AEGIS or its Chinese and Russian counterparts found difficult.

"Ten impossible things before breakfast" wasn't one of Task Force VALKYRIE's unofficial mottos for nothing.

The conventionals too hurled antiship missiles into the fray. Clumsy compared to their prey, whose small stature gave them a margin of safety without hampering their capabilities, a number still fell short despite the telemetry from the shipgirls or were swatted out of the air. Where they connected, though, they dawned in fire, splitting abyssal hulls beneath them.

The good thing couldn't last.

"Abyssal DesDivs laying down smoke!" Bell called in.

It was a useful shorthand, but it wasn't really smoke _per se_. It wasn't getting washed away by the downpour, for one, and along with the visible phenomenon, Uatu's radars began to cloud, the contacts turning intermittent and ghostly.

"Tripoli Actual, Uatu One-One, broke lock, broke lock," Yorktown said, still unflappable despite the situation.

The current hypertech receivers only could take radar returns; bridging the gap with the more exotic practices of unveiling was still out of reach.

"Roger, Uatu. It's all up to you now. Tripoli Actual out."

Without missing a beat, Yorktown shouted, "One-Five, Two-Two, Three-Two!"

Without disrupting their evasive pattern, West Virginia and Maryland dropped to their knees with the synchronisation of sisters who were also comrades, Hammann a little behind. Without letting go of her lance, Maryland brought her hands together in prayer, while West Virginia placed a hand on the water and swirled it, like a tracker seeking a mark. Hammann rose into an animalistic hunch, growling and sniffing at the air like a big cat.

"Bio-"

"-Material-"

"-Spiritual-"

"-Sensing active!" The three of them finished together.

Like a veil being torn, awareness of the abyssals returned despite the radar-disruptive "smoke", powered by the new effects.

"One-One, Two-One, updated."

"Two-One, One-One. Solid copy, reexecuting."

The pattern updated.

Ayaka was fast realising how easy she had had it the first time. The lone battlegroup that had raided New York City had been easy pickings for Gonzalez; three enemy battleships, guarded not just by their own battlegroup's escorts but an extended screen of multiple escort divisions running interference, was putting up far stiffer resistance, laying down a coordinated blanket of fire that made a decisive counterattack difficult, especially since they kept at a safe distance that, with the aviators grounded, meant only the battleships could effectively retaliate.

Princeton's right hand came out of a pocket, full of bombs for her planes, which she swirled in a circle around her hat before sprinkling them in, her hand rising with the motion. "Best part of this new life: Not being useless in bad weather! Burn them, my pretties! Burn like I did!"

Correction: Battleships and sufficiently-capable Spaceworkers. A distant series of explosions punctuated her words.

"Mercy me!" Maryland shouted as a number of abyssal shells whizzed past close by. She gestured with her lance in return, and the flesh of an I, too slow to break her track, started running like melting candlewax beneath the chitin and dripping off its inner structure, the demon ship grinding to a lifeless halt.

While the battleships kept up their fire, said abyssal escorts weren't sitting idle. The 8-inchers on the abyssal heavy cruisers couldn't penetrate battleship armour, but they could shoot off superstructure or hurt the carriers, escorts and conventionals just fine, and they were charging into 5-incher range so the light cruisers and destroyers could engage, sending plenty of lead flying downrange in an attempt to punch a hole in the screen that the TorDesDivs could exploit to go in for a torpedo run.

West Virginia kept fiddling with her halberd even as she kept firing, clearly on edge.

"One-One, Three-Two," Maryland said over a private channel. "Two-Two-"

"One-One, Two-Two," West Virginia said over the unit channel. No, growled more like. "Requesting permission to make change to opening range."

"Two-One, One-One?"

"Negative, Two-Two," Essex said. "Stick to the plan."

"Roger," West Virginia said, clamping down on her frustration with an almost inaudible hiss. Most people wouldn't have noticed it. The other Summoned/Manifested shipgirls didn't have. Ayaka? She knew a lot about almost but not entirely-repressed frustration.

Willie suddenly tripped and smashed facefirst into the water, somehow maintaining her speed while being ground against the surface and starting to drift away from the formation.

"One-Four down!"

As she did so, one of the destroyers in the abyssal BatDiv eased over towards one of its charges and experienced a launcher malfunction that caused it to begin dumping fish into the water. Was there some panicked intra-unit communication? One could only guess. Whatever the cause, the Ta noticed and began maneuvering out of the line of fire.

Then one of its turrets abruptly underwent spontaneous combustion.

Suddenly unbalanced, it tripped and fell, right into the path of the torpedoes it had been trying to evade.

Its detonation was visible by the amalgam despite the distance.

The secondaries on the other two Tas turned towards the culprit and, seemingly heedless as to whether the treacherous deed was accident or deliberate sabotage, summarily executed it in a fusillade of shells. Without any outwardly-visible comment, they returned to the business of trying to juggle the priorities of keeping their fire up and avoiding any further accidents.

A Princeton portal popped into existence above the BatDiv and out came a sprinkling of bombs. The Is opened up on the bombs with their weapons, but all their interception attempts did was cause the burning fragments to cut up the Tas' heads.

Meanwhile, Willie was still drifting towards the abyssal force, and the enemies of man were beginning to notice, directing snapshots towards her.

No, you idiot, don't! Iowa shouted in Ayaka's head, realising what she was thinking.

Weaving, Ayaka tried throwing a temporal shift at the downed shipgirl to shield her against the abyssal shelling, but conspicuously failed to get the usual feedback of a successful casting. Aware of the small window for action, she tried to run some futurecasts, but all it got her was hazy answers, and then there was no more time to augur, only to act.

Please, leave her!

Ayaka activated an acceleration and the world slowed.

Just forget about her!

Please!

As she pushed herself towards Willie's downed form, trying to ignore Other Her's increasingly frantic and desperate pleas to leave the downed destroyer be, Ayaka was painfully aware that the cooldown, such as it were, from Artillery Spotting was ticking down too slowly until she could use any other linear effects, meaning she couldn't Step if something went wrong. Way too slowly.

"Oneee-Twooo, returnnn tooo formationnn." Yorktown's voice came over the radio, stretched out along with the passage of time unlike Other Her's internal beseeching.

Just a little more.

The abyssal BatDiv was still warring with itself, the battleships' secondary batteries and triple-A trying to discourage the destroyers from halping any further, to little avail.

The bio-material-spiritual sensing was still active, but after breaking from the formation, Essex's pattern was now useless and Ayaka didn't have the Sphere proficiency or spellcasting knowledge to recreate it by herself. She was having to rely on her own GFCS to compute the evasive and point defence solutions, which was only merely very difficult rather than impossible because she kept weaving the precognitive vision threads to guide herself, and she was very glad she had enough Timeworking ability. As it was, her shielding was deflecting a lot of shrapnel from shells intercepted too late; she didn't want to imagine what would have happened if she didn't have the advantages acceleration conferred.

Only just a little more.

The light cruiser and remaining destroyers in the abyssal BatDiv began to suffer torpedo launcher malfunctions too. Dead ahead of the battleships, the Ho couldn't make things worse, but the same couldn't be said of the Is positioned to the sides and back of the formation. Even as they tried to keep Princeton's bombs off their charges, all they managed to do was cut up the Tas with fragments and shrapnel while steadily tightening the net of torpedo paths around them.

By the time the Tas decided to stop waiting to lose another of their own and start preemptively executing the traitors apparent, it was already too late.

As the waters claimed them, the Tas kept firing, trying to the last to stab at the shipgirls from Hell's heart.

Just hang on a little bit longer.

After what felt like hours of weaving through shells but she knew was really nowhere near that long, Ayaka finally pulled up next to Willie. Putting her umbrella away, she stooped to pick up the destroyer.

A sudden shiver went down her spine, and she felt the shielding around herself unravel, just as the last-breath salvos spat by the sinking Tas screamed from the sky.

 _The comet split in two-_

Suddenly aware that she had made a mistake, Ayaka made to rewind.

A stutter, like reality was skipping frames, and the imago, partway through being formed, didn't just collapse, it dragged down the acceleration with it. The steady background ticking of a clock that accompanied the spell suddenly struck a discordant note. With an otherworldly thrum, followed by the sound of shattering glass, time abruptly resumed its normal rate of passing, and all Ayaka could do was reflexively try to twist out of the path of the shells.

It wasn't enough.

For what it was worth, the shells didn't impact dead-on and punch directly into her internals. What they did do, however, was slash their way down and across her back, barely missing her stack.

A scream tore its way out of Ayaka's throat.

That the shells had expended most of their energy gouging ghastly grooves in her back, with some only denting the lower right arm of her rigging before dropping into the water, was no consolation. Her sight reddened and began to fog, not just because of tears; it took everything she had to keep a hold on Willie. Her teeth reflexively clamped together; there was an odd taste in her mouth, and it took a moment to realise she had bitten down hard enough to taste blood and oil. Her back seared so badly she couldn't focus.

Despite the somehow-dispelled acceleration, there was a strange, nightmarishly inevitable slowness to how she could somehow tell when the remaining abyssal shells were detonating from their fail-deadly fuses, the shrapnel launching forth and seeking her exposed insides. The Step "button", such as it were, finally responded to her desperate mental smashing, and she willed it so instinctually, almost panicked. The shrapnel missed them by just-

Too close.

Far too close.

As she rematerialised and let go of Willie, Ayaka stumbled and barely caught herself with a hand rather than her face, her hat falling off. Her back burned from the deep welts the shells had carved. She could feel the blood - or oil, she wasn't sure - tickling her skin as it flowed down from the wound, soaking into her shredded dress.

"Hammann doesn't especially want to help you!" The destroyer said after she Stepped over, but nevertheless pulled a hose from somewhere and started spraying a jet of water at the battle damage. It tingled and itched. Ayaka couldn't contort enough to see the wound, which only worsened the alienness of this sensation of flesh regrowing and metal regenerating itself in real time, filling the gaps seemingly from nothing.

After a while, Hammann made a satisfied grunt, sailed over to her front and deluged the damaged lower right arm, then her face with the water until Ayaka couldn't feel the wound any more. "Hammann brought her healing heart with great mercy, thank me properly," she said while stowing the hose away.

"Thank you." Ayaka sputtered as she slowly rose to her feet.

"Hmph. Wimpy Natural Borns. Just a little hull damage and you scream bloody murder. Mary and Wee Vee don't do that with worse." The destroyer picked up Ayaka's hat and returned it. "Your outer compartments are fine. I can't repair your clothes, though!"

Ayaka hesitantly reached behind her and frowned as she patted down bare, unmarred skin where the abyssal shells had torn through her dress along with her skin. The pain was gone. Not just suppressed like after taking painkillers, but actually gone.

She had known Hammann was one of the Lifeworkers in the amalgam, but actually being on the receiving end of a healing heart was a new experience. It was as if she had merely had a vivid hallucination as far as the wounds were concerned.

A large part of the back of her dress was still torn, though, and her hand came back bloody. With the pain gone, she could actually think straight again, and she shivered, glad she was a shipgirl. With all that had been torn out of her back, all that tissue damage and blood loss, she would certainly have gone straight into shock and a quick death if she had still been a normal human.

Still fired up with adrenaline - or whatever its equivalent for a ship was - Ayaka only very distantly registered that in ruining the back of her dress, the enemy fire had also torn off the back of her bra.

"What just happened?"

Hammann looked from her to where Yorktown was chewing Willie, who had clambered to her feet, out with chilling calm while continuing to give orders. "Willie? An uncontrollable double-edged sword that didn't reveal its nature until already on board with us. When it works, it's great." The hand that had stowed the hose away now gestured in the rough bearing of the abyssal BatDiv that had turned on itself. "When it doesn't, or even when it does…" she bared her teeth. "No matter what we do, we haven't found a way to make her reliable, and no one wants to take her off our hands. All we can do is hope the problem sorts itself out one way or another."

Ayaka found herself thinking, oddly, that it might have been easier if Hammann had smirked or otherwise shown clear malevolence. The utterly matter-of-fact way the _tsundere_ destroyer talked about hoping the implied liability settled itself was chilling.

"One-Two, knock it off with the martyr complex and get back in the saddle!" Yorktown said, and the moment passed as the plan reasserted itself in Ayaka's mind.

"One-One, Three-Five!" The radio clicked on again a while and a few more slain abyssals later, filling with a panicked voice. "New contacts inbound from the south! TorDesDiv, TorDesDiv! They're trying to flank us!"

"How did they get there?!" someone asked.

"The same way we dodged Red sats in the Cold War maybe?!" Someone else suggested.

"One-One, Two-Two." West Virginia sounded ravenous; the way she was twirling her halberd fast enough to generate wind only reinforced the image. "Requesting permission to go in for the kill."

{My Hero Academia Original Soundtrack - Jet Set Run}

YouTube watch?v=U_FDru9B670

Casting a sidelong glare at the battleship in question, Yorktown ground her teeth barely audibly. "Again? Why, God, why on Earth does a ship famous for sinking her target from out of range have a giant pig sticker and the desire to use it every time she can? This should be something Little E should be handling, not me," she muttered with a weary frustration, one arm twitching in a manner that suggested she really wanted to facepalm, even though she knew she shouldn't in public. Repressing a growl, she added, "Two-One, One-One, confirm course of action."

"Affirm," Essex said this time.

"One-One, all ships, run futurecast."

A litany of affirmatives followed, prompting a barely-audible sigh from Yorktown. "Two-Two, One-One, permission granted."

"Copy that."

"Rocket jump! Rocket jump!" Bell squawked.

"Do it," Princeton said, going for another handful of bombs.

Ayaka couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"Two-Two, Three-One, do not advise that course of action," Yorktown said.

"C'mon, Yorkie!"

"But One-One-" Essex started.

"Two-One, Three-One, belay that."

"Wilco," Princeton said reluctantly as she set aside the bombs.

"Remaining ships, we've got this," Yorktown said.

"But-"

"Repeat, the situation is Under Control."

Yorktown's words rang with Certainty, and the otherwise-unoccupied members of the amalgam redoubled their efforts against the abyssal main force.

"Cover me then!" Princeton shouted. "Portal going up!" She went for her cane, spun to face southwards, and began moving it through the air. Sparks sprung to life following where the cane pointed as Princeton formed a massive circle, a rumbling sound thrumming as it was completed. "Uatu Two, portal ready on your mark!"

"Roger!" West Virginia replied. "Tonight, Uatu Two joins the hunt!"

As one, the members of Uatu Two drew their left hands and legs back while swiping their right hands forward. Blue lightning crackled and flowed over their bodies; dualtone auras sprang into existence around them.

"Going in and going in and going in-"

"-like the US Marshall and his three daughters!" the rest of the element finished.

With a great explosion of scattering water, the shipgirls surged towards the portal, which flared into life with minimal warning for the abyssals they were about to surprise.

"Who comes up with these lines?" Willie asked, annoyed in an adorably petulant manner. "Quincy?"

Uatu One and Three failed to hold back laughter even as they kept up their fire and maneuvers.

Engines roaring at flank speed, the abyssals on the southern flank laid down a barrage of suppressive fire against Three-Five and Three-Six that forced the shipgirls in question to stay defensive, reduced to ineffectual snapshots, even as they charged into torpedo range of the convoy.

Five kilometres to release.

Four.

Three.

Two.

"A little help over here, please!" Three-Six screamed into her radio as shells whizzed by, barely missing her.

One.

And then the exit portal blazed to life, Uatu Two rocketing forth like bats strapped to Saturn Vs out of Hell.

The spike of West Virginia's halberd, flowing with supernal power, speared into the Ho, spilling abyssal ichor in great gouts. The mutant's flesh began degrading rapidly, the effect spreading outward from the impact and crumbling what it touched to dust. Twisting, she pulled the spike out, sidestepped and used the axehead to split the light cruiser's misshapen cylindrical hull even as, with the same motion, she brought a turret in line with a destroyer and erased it with a barrage.

Essex burst into the centre of the formation, twin pistol-cannons already at the ready, and began firing.

By the application of hyperstatistical effects, optionally augmenting with energetic, mental, spatial and temporal sensing, it was possible to determine if not outright create and move between positions both geographic and bodily-kinesthetic whereby one established kill zones that minimised enemy accuracy while maximising the effectiveness of one's own fire.

Like doing the robot but with more murder.

One of the Is keeled hard, trying to draw a bead on Essex, mouth opening to fire.

Without looking, she put a shell into its face at the exact moment one of its own would have come roaring out from the mouth cannon, and the perfectly-timed shot caused both to detonate, with predictable results. The follow-up burst sought out its torpedoes and magazines unerringly and tore it apart.

Oakland came out of the lunge sliding, and as she neared her target she exploded skyward in a rising uppercut, ascending even as she sent the abyssal speeding for the stars. Drawing her right arm back, metal unfolded from the rings and shaped into a gauntlet even as she sent it rocketing forward on jets of Or Energy right into the face of her target. There was a burst of white light and the abyssal began to explode and disintegrate, shedding parts catastrophically as it was sent flying into the distance.

As it broke apart, its torpedoes dropped free and fired off their motors.

"Fish! Fish! Fish in the water!" Oakland shouted even as she lunged towards her next target.

The abyssals had apparently decided then that it was better to take a nonoptimal shot than sink before taking any at all, and promptly began launching their torpedoes as fast as their launchers could cycle.

"Two-Three, Three-Five, got it covered!" Three-Five and Three-Six immediately shifted their attention to taking out the torpedoes.

Not long later, it was all over.

Two of the destroyers finished beating the last abyssal in the flanking force to death with torpedoes and gave a coordinated thumbs up as its explosion-torn wreck slipped beneath the waves. "Two-One, clear."

"One-One, Two-One, clear."

"Copy that, Two-One. Overlord, Uatu One-One. Status confirmed. All hostiles are down and the area is secure."

"Solid copy, Uatu. Status confirmed. Mission accomplished. Patching Uatu Actual in."

"Uatu, Uatu Actual," Zelben said. "Good job, girls. Maintain watch for another hour before standing down. Any further queries?"

"Wait one." Yorktown scanned the amalgam and convoy with her optics and radar, getting an overflight from Bell at the same time. "None, Sir," she eventually said.

"Very good. As you were. Uatu Actual out."

===[===]===

Ayaka stirred and slowly took in a deep breath, feeling the heat of the repair bath she had dozed off in despite herself. Repair fluid always smelled like metal powder and minerals, oddly comforting. Space was at a premium even in the well-appointed LHA, and the repair baths were the right traditional size, far more modest than the generous pools available on shore. A hand reached for her back and slowly, hesitantly felt it, as if still unbelieving that it was whole and not in fact slashed open by enemy fire. There was still no sign of the pain that had felt like it was going to consume her.

After the hour had passed and the stand down from general quarters had been given, the shipgirls who had been damaged got marching orders to get repairs done, and not a moment too soon. Ayaka had quickly found that the impromptu backlessness of her dress didn't really agree with her, even if her bra hadn't also lost its back in the collateral.

As she had undressed and dropped the torn clothing into the designated tub of repair fluid to let it soak and get restored, Ayaka had taken a moment to give thanks that the repair costs weren't coming out of her own pocket, especially not if this was going to be a recurring problem.

She would frankly appreciate more long hot baths and less mind-numbing terror.

Ayaka looked up at the display showing repair times and sighed before looking down again. Hers was conspicuously the longest. The maintenance functions of the repair bath were about more than just physical repairs to a shipgirl's biomechanical condition. It apparently wasn't deemed necessary for everyone to go in after even damage-free sorties, as the case after her Reawakening had shown. The training at MDL had been an exception to that. However, regularly-scheduled baths were still required to ensure optimal functioning. There was purportedly some complex interlocking set of factors Ayaka didn't understand that explained why making repair fluid safe for normal humans' use was more difficult than merely diluting it.

A slight tingling in her stomach reminded her that she needed to resupply once she was done here. The restorative effects were staving off the hunger pangs, but that would change quickly once she was out.

Checking her internal chronometer, she realised she had missed her usual time for prayers and got to rectifying that to the best of her ability within these confines, begging the indulgence of the _kami_ for her present inability to properly preface it with offerings and purification.

When she was done, she became aware of a shadow falling over her and looked up to see the small form of Willie, side presented to her, looking into the distance at nothing in particular.

The younger-looking shipgirl mumbled something barely audible even to her.

"Sorry?"

Slowly, as if afraid turning too fast would cause her to spin out of control, the destroyer turned soulful red eyes on her and spoke again.

"Thank you."

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Some days we wonder why we are still here writing this, considering the lukewarm at best reception. Just to suffer? And then we write a literal eagle being launched off a carrier, proving that you can indeed unintentionally out-Murica intentional Murica.

Why Jet Set? You Say is being saved for a very, very special person.

You know a funny thing? Back when we were first deciding on a magic system, MCU!Dr Strange was one of the things we had in mind. You can still see subtle nods to it here and there.

Anyone familiar with Russian patronymics and Air Force doctrine can lend a hand for the next chapter?


	14. Chapter 13

Authors' Notes: Japan, finally! What is pacing

How do you Russian patronymic

Our thanks to Andmeuths from SpaceBattles for some suggestions on improving Chapter One.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 13

===[===]===

A few watches later

===[===]===

Essex seemed particularly tense this change of watch, Ayaka noted. "What's wrong?" she asked.

{My Hero Academia Original Soundtrack - Spreading Anxiety}

YouTube watch?v=1zwXCnKfahI

"Reds bearing 315, angels 20, 400 miles out!" Bell squawked.

Ayaka was almost literally of two minds about that. Being born well after the Cold War, she had no particular dread of the Russians.

The same could not be said of Other Her, between bombarding the North Koreans in the 1950s and being reactivated in the 1980s as part of the 600-ship Navy specifically in response to the Soviet _Kirov_ -class missile cruisers. There was a palpable, deep-seated distrust of them infusing almost every bit of Other Her and it did not help that she had not been awake to see the collapse of the USSR.

"Overlord, Uatu One-One, requesting confirmation of Russians bearing 315, angels 20, 400 miles out."

"Affirmative, Uatu One-One, two-ship of Russian Air Force Tu-22s flying TFV maritime patrol and fire support," the reply came back shortly. "Would you like me to patch them in?"

"Yes, please."

"Copy that, wait one."

There was a pause before a Russian-accented voice got on the radio. "Uatu One-One, Shikra 201, are you reading us?"

"Reading you five by five, Shikra 201."

"Ah, wonderful! Captain Anatoli Mikhailovich Gryzlov at your service, Yorktown Ernestasova. Well, I say 'captain' because that's the closest equivalent and most of you don't speak _suka blyat_." Oakland giggled at the comment. "What a shame, I say. Apologies for missing out on the first encounter. Any more abyssals need to make sandwiches?"

Essex shuddered. Ayaka felt a tinge of fear; from Other Her, she knew full well what the oblique joke meant.

"Negative, Shikra 201."

"Relax, Yorktown Ernestasova, and tell Essex Donaldova and… oh, a new comrade?" Gryzlov paused, and faint whispers of off-mic conversation could be heard. "Yes, yes! Tell Iowa Ivanova to, what is that word, chill? You are not Yorktown Ilyanova. Let the past be the past; I was but a child in the last days of the Union, and we are all friends now!"

"My ass!" Bell squawked, though on the unit's private channel fortunately.

"Bell!"

===[===]===

{Carpenter Brut - Turbo Killer}

YouTube watch?v=wy9r2qeouiQ

"Uatu, Overlord, be advised," the communique came some time later. It was a beautiful morning to be reaching the Kurils. "Seal inbound. Check your fire. Repeat, Seal inbound. Check your fire."

"Great, the speed slut," West Virginia muttered over her radio from within the _Tripoli_ , where she was awake and was getting ready for the change of watch.

"Ah, the weirdo _Colorad_ o. Here she goes again," someone remarked with a sigh.

"Copy that, Overlord," Yorktown radioed, ignoring both comments.

"Who?" Ayaka asked.

"Shimakaze, of course," Hammann said with a tooth-baring frown.

Oh, right, she of the black bunny ears headband, white sleeveless sailor top with blue collar, elbow gloves, blue skirt that might as well be a belt, black G-string and striped thighhighs.

"I know all of us shipgirls are seething cesspools of carnal urges and far too many uninhibitedly flaunt the flesh and indulge them via fornication," West Virginia stopped short of outright ugily hawking up phlegm at the term, "but at least most know to be discreet." It didn't sound like much of a concession, not the way she bit out the words like she was crushing them between the teeth of a steel-jaw trap and arms twitching like she was fighting off the urge to gesticulate. "Not this speed slut who runs around in public wearing a perversion of a good sailor uniform that wouldn't be out of place in Hefner's den of debauchery! Just because you have perverts perverting something into their sexual fantasy does not mean that the original noble nature, such as that of the nun or nurse or policeman, is henceforth turned profane! I don't care if there is some demonstrated benefit to ample amounts of copulation, some symbolic logic about power in the seed of life that makes reproductive fluid an excellent catalyst for drawing Or Energy! We are officers and ladies of the United States Navy! It is unbecoming to act like a rutting - literally and figuratively - traveling troupe of witches and whores!"

Ayaka pursed her lips firmly. She had sent messages to Alice shortly after getting the assignment, seeking to find out more about the amalgam's members. As it turned out, for all her mania for CLOSE RANGE, West Virginia was apparently a staunchly traditional sort; she held a hunting licence she had used to actually bring personally-slain game back to Everett with and there were actual pen and paper letters from her to the high command decrying in impeccable penmanship the immodest attire and alleged behaviour of certain shipgirls and calling for reform. It had never gained much traction.

Ayaka did entirely agree on the matter of shipgirl decency and dignity - there was a proper time and place for such things! - but West Virginia was frankly a bit too strident for her. As it was, she was just glad Helena and St Louis hadn't been assigned to Uatu. It was bad enough that she perpetually looked one bad day away from letting free an explosive rant at someone with an impaired sense of modesty, a condition that had evidently been fulfilled today. The proprietious old battleship would never shut up if they had.

"But we are witches, aren't we?" One-Six remarked. "I mean, maybe more Etherite: The Technomancing than the traditional robe and broomstick sort, but we are still witches, right?"

"Whores… maybe I should start charging," One-Three said, a hungry look on her face as she licked her lips audibly. "After all, if you're good at something, never do it for free, right?"

"Three, the Joker is not a role model and you did not just insinuate you intend to violate FM 27-1 chapter 10," Yorktown said.

"No, One, I definitely did not," One-Three said with a face so straight you could use it as a ruler.

"Good. Let us talk no more of fundraisin-"

Ayaka's surroundings abruptly turned fuzzy and Yorktown's speech elongated as the acceleration she had spent the past few days figuring out how to hang activated in response to detecting an incoming high-speed object.

"Eh?"

She tracked first with radar and then her eyes the form of an underdressed blonde shipgirl and three autonomous turrets, skating across the water at a speed that was still frightfully great even under this altered frame of reference, if not imperceivably so any longer. Lightning snapped, crackled and flowed freely across her body, similar to that of the lunge rote. A massive wave front followed in her wake.

 _Kamisama_ above, what was she wearing?!

Ayaka couldn't help the bright red flush that sprung to life on her face, her umbrella falling from her fingers as she reflexively covered her mouth with her hands. It was one thing to look at Shimakaze through photographs or video. It was a whole different matter to see her in the flesh, and she now understood very viscerally why West Virginia had been so appalled by the other shipgirl's perpetual state of undress.

The shipgirl, who had herself been scanning the convoy visually, froze mid-turn when she realised that Ayaka was following her progress, grey eyes widening and mouth falling open. The animate turrets, too, stared in horror.

Tripping on something, they went flying.

"Ouuuuuuu-"

Ayaka had barely begun Stepping towards where her fire directors told her Shimakaze was projected to land when the other shipgirl landed handfirst on the water, did a handspring and slammed back down, sliding to a stationkeeping halt in a perfect three-point landing Tony Stark would have approved of. A few seconds later, the deafening crack of crossing back under the sound barrier hit them.

Oh Musubi no Kami, why, Ayaka thought with horror as she noticed the microskirt hang low enough to expose butt crack.

Then Shimakaze turned to face her squarely, looking annoyed, spitting out words so quickly they came out in real time even under the accelerated frame of reference. {What is with you Timeworkers doing that? It was bad enough with only Mamakagi!}

Ayaka blinked.

"Oh, right!" Shimakaze abruptly switched to Japanese-accented English. "You Americans barely speak any Japanese! Sorry, I forgot! Shimakaze, first and only of my class, very fast picket. When it comes to speed, I'm the best there is, swift as the island breeze!" The stripper destroyer (stripoyer? Destripper?) said with arm raised.

Still overwhelmed by the sight of the shipgirl before her, who Ayaka was surprised hadn't been arrested or otherwise censured for public indecency a dozen times over yet, the girl whose screen was busy being as blue as her dress reflexively slipped back into habit.

That is to say, she bowed, form perfected from practice, and said in Japanese, {Pleased to meet you. I am Ayaka Godai. Thank you for having me.}

Shimakaze froze and looked, really looked carefully at Ayaka again.

Ayaka wondered if she had accidentally let slip some Gifuese into her words and retried, careful to properly enunciate standard Japanese.

Shimakaze's stare only grew stronger, switching back to Japanese as she did so. {What are you?}

{Sorry?}

There was an edge to the stripoyer's gaze that reminded Ayaka a bit too much of that inauspicious first meeting with O'Bannon. {My warbook says you're supposed to be Iowa!}

{I am!}

{That can't be right! If you're a Natural Born… when I first saw you in the convoy, I thought you were one of them, and now-not like-like-I've met _yonsei_ and _gosei_ and whatever- _sei_ both in Yokosuka and amongst the civilians, and there's always been something about how they speak that's off, something about their movements that isn't right, if they can even string two sentences together! Not like you!}

Ayaka didn't know what to say to that.

"Seal, how copy?" Fortunately, enough time had finally passed for the rest of the world for Yorktown to notice and sail over.

"Ou-ou-ou- _ohayo_!" Shimakaze said in English at a normal speed, turning to face her. "Uatu One-One, Seal, reading you five by five!"

Yorktown nodded. "Overlord, Uatu One-One, have made contact with Seal."

"Copy that, Uatu One-One. Seal, proceed with VBSS sweep."

" _Hai_ ~" Shimakaze pulled out devices from somewhere, handed some to the turret trio and in a blur, a discharge of lightning and a sonic boom that sent water flying and reactivated the acceleration Ayaka had deactivated moments ago, she was off, running scans on the convoy and its guardians to make sure there wasn't anything out of the ordinary on board.

Everything went uneventfully until it was the _Tripoli's_ turn.

"Ou, hag! Gotten laid yet?" Shimakaze asked as she waved to West Virginia, having made her way to the shipgirl berthing compartments.

"Rut you, speed slut," West Virginia muttered.

"Now, now, that's not a nice thing to say around Rensouhou- _chan_ , you know!" Shimakaze raised a finger chidingly, then turned to the turrets. "Go ahead first, okay?"

Rensouhou- _chan_ made affirmatives in Morse code and went on their way, after which Shimakaze turned back to West Virginia.

" _Osoi~_ I'll be glad to share a few boys with you if you're finally ready to start! Wait, do I even have any of your type?" Shimakaze raised a contemplative finger to her mouth. "I prefer my main guns fast to fire and reload, but maybe you've got a slow groove on your mind?"

"I said, rut that."

"You want a man with a slow hand?" She started singing the Pointer Sisters hit while dodging swings from the battleship. "You want a lover with an easy touch? You want somebody who will spend some time? Not come and go in a heated rush? When it comes to love-"

"Rut off."

"Seal, stop playing with Two-Two and do your job," Yorktown said flatly.

" _Hai!_ Don't be slow about finding me when your machine shop is ready to drink up, hag!" Shimakaze lazily dodged a final swing from West Virginia and sped off.

After some more searching, Shimakaze returned to the front of the convoy. "Overlord, Seal, convoy checks out!"

"Copy that, Seal."

"Uatu," Shimakaze said next, "stand by for space fold!" Turning to face Hokkaido, she dropped into a runner's starting position while Rensouhou- _chan_ lined up off to the side and began raising their flippers in order while making sounds like the flagging-off of a race.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

BEEP

With an explosion of water and a sonic boom, Shimakaze sprinted into the distance, disappearing out of visual range.

She ran back.

Ayaka felt a tingly sensation like static electricity.

Shimakaze ran off and came back again.

The electrical sensation intensified.

To and fro, to and fro, to and fro again and again, the feeling steadily growing with every lap she made.

Shimakaze completed one last lap and the tingling peaked before settling, leaving only a pleasant warm feeling.

The view ahead now looked a bit off, but Ayaka couldn't put a finger on it.

She found it hard to describe what happened next.

One moment, the convoy was still in the waters of the Kurils.

The next, she sailed through some invisible boundary, and Hokkaido was suddenly just there within visual range, without the slightest hint of discontinuity.

"Holy shit!" Someone shouted, and from Yorktown's failure to reprimand the offender, it was apparently a common sentiment.

"I'm pretty good, huh?" Shimakaze said, making some gesture that involved her standing side-on to the convoy and pointing with her index and middle fingers.

"Uatu, Overlord, be advised, inbound chicks from Kosumi Squadron."

Ayaka couldn't miss the way Yorktown's head snapped up at the announcement, or Hammann's low, dark mutter of "At least it's not Tomonaga."

There was a buzz faint from distance as Type 0 Fighter Model 52s approached, Yorktown's combat air patrol (CAP) of F4F-4s meeting them halfway and circling around each other.

"Yorktown Actual, have made contact," the squadron leader radioed in.

"Yorktown Actual copies," Yorktown said.

Shimakaze went through a gymnastics routine while waiting for the whole convoy to go through the folded space, making a comment about its slowness every so often, but eventually the rearguard destroyers indicated there were no more freighters left, and with a reversal of the flagging-off sequence, the effect collapsed.

{The Place Promised in Our Early Days Original Soundtrack - Daily}

YouTube watch?v=qLdQpNYSIwg

Shortly afterwards, a carrier division sailed into visual range, four destroyers circling a pair of carriers. More shipgirls trailed at a distance.

Hiryuu had brown eyes and short brown hair tied into a small ponytail on the right. She wore an orange kimono and a dark green hakama skirt, an apron modelled after the bow end of a flight deck with the first _kana_ of her name over that. For legwear she had white _tabi_ socks and sandals like miniature carriers. She wore a three-fingered brown _yugake_ glove on her right hand. Her rigging was simple: A quiver with a mast on a brown sling, a stack hanging from a belt, and a flight deck on her left arm. She held her _yumi_ bow in her left hand.

Souryuu had blue eyes and hair in twintails bound by white ribbons pointing up such that they looked like the horns of a dragon. Her clothing was similar to Hiryuu's except for being green kimono on blue hakama skirt and with the flight deck on the right arm.

Hiryuu waved cheerily at the amalgam; Souryuu was more reluctant in her greetings.

Yorktown merely returned a noncomittal look; Hammann's frown was more blatant.

J-Carrier Division Two came to a halt and saluted. "Yorktown, I am your relief," Hiryuu said, her English Japanese-accented but curiously with a hint of Russian.

"I stand relieved," Yorktown replied, returning the salute.

"We in the Second Carrier Division, First Air Fleet, His Majesty's Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force welcome you to Japan on behalf of the Japanese division of Task Force VALKYRIE's Pacific Protectorate!" Hiryuu said brightly. "Please hold on." She switched over to the TFV channel. "Overlord, Dragon One, have made contact with Uatu, over."

"Copy that, Dragon One. Proceed as instructed. Informing convoy. No change in orders."

"Ou! What about me?!" Shimakaze said, cutting into the conversation.

"Seal, return to patrol. Overlord out."

"Alright! Let's go, Rensouhou- _chan_! See you all again soon! Hurry up and find yourself a man, hag!" Shimakaze shouted so quickly her words blurred together, and she zoomed off with her animated turrets, leaving churning waves and another sonic boom in her wake.

"Say goodbye to the _Hayai_ Harlot, girls!" Hiryuu said.

"Bye, _Hayai_ Harlot!" Her escorting destroyers said.

After the desstriper departed, Hiryuu looked over the element and squinted in confusion. "When did the US Navy recover Warship Number 111 and complete her, Yorktown- _chan_?"

"Huh?" Yorktown made no attempt to hide her befuddlement at the non sequitur.

She pointed at Ayaka while sailing over. "That's _yon_ -mato, isn't she?"

Ayaka started. "Ehhh?"

"I mean, she's doing a great job of blending in as one of you, but I'm quite sure that's one of us. She even squeaks like one of us. I've met N1ers and other foreigners who've been using the language for decades and they can never get it totally right." She looked back at Ayaka. "Say it again, please?"

"Ah… ehhh?"

"See? Perfection!"

"But I'm-"

"HAHAHA!" Hiryuu couldn't keep the act up any longer. "Just messing with you, Iowa- _san_." She heartily slapped Ayaka on the upper arm a few times with an outstretched arm of her own.

Ayaka merely stared.

"I dunno, Hiryuu, she really does remind me more of Fusou- _san_ ," Souryuu said.

Hiryuu looked at Ayaka again, twisted to scrutinize her, hand on chin. "There's some resemblance, I think?" She clapped her hands sharply twice. "Right! Let's begin the distribution!" Now serious, she began barking out orders, and about half of the cargo ships peeled off from the convoy, the gaggle of destroyers and coast defence ships that had been following in J-CarDiv Two's wake forming up on them with practised precision. At least one was bound for Hokkaido proper, while the rest would be following the northern Honshu coast south and west to other major ports in the country, the better to distribute the desperately-needed foodstuff from multiple hubs rather than rely on waiting for it to radiate outward from the facilities in the Tokyo Bay region.

With the splitoff done, the remaining half of the convoy began heading southwards along the edge of the Tohoku region, guarded by their shepherds.

"Dragon One, Uatu Two-One, forming up," Essex said as her element disembarked from _Tripoli_ and approached. For the final stretch, the entire amalgam would not be rotating out to break but would stay on the clock once they were up and only take their rest and resupply once they got to Yokosuka.

"Uatu Two-One, are we doing the thing?!" Hiryuu asked excitedly.

"Are we?!" The rest of J-CarDiv Two chorused.

Essex mutely produced her recorder.

"Yes!"

"Alright, girls!" Hammann shouted. "A one, a two, a one two three!"

West Virginia twitched.

"Almost Heaven…"

===[===]===

"How're the newcomers?" Hiryuu asked a short while later.

Yorktown merely gave her a Look.

Hiryuu's smile dimmed. "That bad?"

Yorktown checked the channel was Secure and that they were not speaking aloud, then looked at Hammann.

"One-Two - that's your Warship Number 111 - is an idiot," the destroyer said after checking for herself that only the three of them were on.

"Like Quincy?" Hiryuu asked.

"I wish she was the funny kind of idiot. No."

"How so, then?"

"She's got the self-preservation instincts of a lemming."

"You don't mean…" Hiryuu got a section of Type 0s from her CAP to make a pass over the sector Uatu One was charged with covering, the move allowing her to get a visual on the battleship with the maddeningly unplaceable features without shifting in any way that might betray her attention. If she could be frank, she hadn't been entirely joking with the suggestion that Iowa was really the never-completed fourth _Yamato_. Her kids had heard from Sara's kids about the Natural Born, but that didn't make it any less confusing when her warbook was telling her one thing and the features and mannerisms she observed with her senses, such as they were, told her another. "William Porter?"

"Yes, Wee Willie Worthless."

"But… why?" By now, Hiryuu's smile, already barely clinging to life, had melted away into open confusion.

"Willie D Fuck should I know?! You're all inscrutable." Hammann started making irritated incoherent sounds under her breath.

Meanwhile, the fact that they were following the east Tohoku coast had put a thought in Ayaka's head, and she launched a Kingfisher into the air. At her mental direction, the scout plane broke from the convoy and headed inland.

Splitting off some of her attention to what the toy-sized plane saw, Ayaka watched as it flew over thriving habitations near the coast. The area had been spared the worst of the abyssal predations, but that wasn't, she abruptly realized, why she was interested in it.

An outside observer going in blind would never have guessed that much of what the scout was seeing had been engulfed by the great tsunami following the March 11th 2011 earthquake. 12 years had been enough to heal the external signs of the devastation that had befallen northeastern Japan that day.

If only the same could be said of Imamura.

Her fellow townspeople had always done their best to keep up with the news of the ancestral homeland even in the days before air and electronic mail, and learning of the disaster had filled them all with great sadness and an eagerness to contribute the metaphorical widow's last coins to the reconstruction. Little had they known that a mere two years later, it would be their turn, and unlike, say, Onagawa or Kesennuma, Imamura had withered away. Whether it had been the original timeline where around 500 of them - including herself, Ayaka noted with a dark smile - had been killed or the present one where all had escaped with their lives, people had steadily moved away from Imamura rather than stay to rebuild, FEMA assistance or not. Eventually, all that was left was abandoned buildings telling a now-ended story and the Imamura Memorial Museum that had used to be the high school.

The sight of a derailed train lying on its side, still uncleared after 3 years, floated to the surface of her mind from Uileag's memories of that trip 7 years ago to find her with Kas and Okudera- _sempai_.

Ayaka sometimes wondered why. Was it merely a human desire to leave the site of disaster and tragedy behind? Or, with what she now knew of paranormal matters, had the Cometfall been yet another move in a vast arcane game of cosmic entities, gods and spirits played at an extradimensional scale beyond the comprehension of mankind? She suspected there was some Correspondent significance in the fact that the fragment of Fafnir had landed squarely on the Shirokaze Shrine like some overgrown precision-guided munition and said destruction of the town's spiritual heart had been followed by the bonds that tied it together unravelling.

Lost in thought, she didn't notice that Willie had been staring at her.

After the convoy turned the corner on southeast Japan near Choshi, a new batch of Japanese shipgirls came out to meet them. At the front of the destroyer squadron in the lead were two _Yuugumos_ , the destroyers obvious by their distinctive maroon pinafores, white long-sleeved blouses, turquoise bowties, grey pantyhose and black and white lace-up boots. One had brown eyes and short green hair with blunt bangs, braids to each side and a payot longer than the rest of the hair. She held a 12.7cm/50 Type 3 twin gun mount in her left hand, had quadruple torpedo launchers strapped to each thigh and the stack she wore using two backpack-like straps had a swing arm with a Type 96 25mm twin autocannon mount.

Slight trembling gave away the brave front she was projecting. This would be Takanami, making the unit J-Destroyer Squadron Two.

The other-

{Voices of a Distant Star Original Soundtrack - Beginning}

YouTube watch?v=nJ08pVBLFQ0

Reality flickered _and took on a brownish-grey hue._

 _A peal of thunder._

 _The hissing of the falling rain, lending a blur to what lay beyond._

 _The whispering of wind, sounding vaguely like a gentle, melancholy tune played on a piano._

 _There was a bus stop by an unremarkable, desolate road, one of unfamiliar design. Blocky, dull grey, clearly function over form. The sign out front was more colourful - red, orange and white - and the wording on it was Japanese, but the characters were indistinct, muddled enough to be unreadable. A bicycle was parked outside. There was something serene yet sad about the sight._

 _Under the shelter of the bus stop, a boy and a girl, both middle schoolers from the look of things, sat on the wooden bench within and chatted, wet shoes removed. An open box of chocolates and canned drinks sat next to them._

 _The girl, who was seated closer to the exit, turned her head to look out-_

Reality reasserted itself into a sunny day on the sea.

What was that?

Ayaka blinked a few times and refocused on the other _Yuugumo_. She had yellow eyes with a purple tint and long hair that was black on the outside and pink on the inside, a half updo held in place by a yellow ribbon. Her mouth open to bare noticeably sharp canines.

Unlike her sister, Naganami's rigging had a lot more going on. A gold blade of Or Energy extended from a bracer on her left wrist, an inactivated twin on the right. Ayaka had never studied the blade, but Imamura's schools had been small places, and by osmosis if nothing else she recognised the other shipgirl's posture as a kendo guard stance. Vector-capable thrusters were mounted on her lower legs and to the sides of her stack. Directly behind her shoulder blades were a pair of pods marked with grooves that looked like missile cells.

They formed up on the convoy without incident.

It was not far past where Nojimazaki Lighthouse's powerful lamps were futilely fighting back the encroaching night when the convoy split again. Uatu, J-CarDiv Two and J-DesRon Two followed a few of the freighters northward, passing Sunosaki Lighthouse as they headed up the Uraga Channel into Tokyo Bay. The remainder continued their westward journey to western Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku.

Night had fallen by the time their section of the convoy made it into Tokyo Bay proper and the tugs were in place to begin towing the cargo ships the final few miles to their berths. The excitement had worn off, and Ayaka was starting to feel fatigue setting in, though fortunately she wasn't going to be yawning just yet.

The sight of Tokyo, towers of gleaming glass and steel brilliantly lit up in defiance of the ongoing war, still took her breath away. Even the cranes involved in reconstruction didn't detract from the view. It was different from being in their midst or looking down from from the Skytree, and she mentally added "see Tokyo from the water at night" to her bucket list before immediately checking it off.

J-DesRon Two would be remaining on station a while longer. For the rest of them, it was time to turn and head back south to Fleet Activities Yokosuka, which _Tripoli_ and the two destroyers had headed straight for.

"Uatu, gather!" Yorktown shouted once they had made landfall and dismissed their rigging, making a stop gesture as she did so. "Dragon, please hold."

"Roger," Hiryuu said, her unit standing around a distance away.

Yorktown then got onto her radio. "Overlord, Uatu One-One. Uatu is feet dry. Repeat, Uatu is feet dry."

"Copy that, patching Uatu Actual in."

"Uatu One-One, Uatu Actual," Zelben said. "Anything new to report?"

"No, Sir."

"Good. Go in for your maintenance baths. You have a meeting scheduled with Admiral Minami after breakfast tomorrow. Current plan is at least one more day of shore leave afterwards and joint patrols while the transports finish unloading and turnaround, details pending."

"Very good, Sir."

"Any questions?"

Yorktown looked around at the amalgam, waited a bit for the more reserved among them to turn thought to word. When nothing came, she said, "No, Sir."

"Very well. Good job, girls. Dismissed. Uatu Actual out."

Zelben hung up.

"Personnel who have been here before, go straight to the baths. FNGs, with me. We need to get you checked in with security first. Uatu, advance!"

With a fair bit of enthusiasm, even from the normally inhibited ones like Essex and West Virginia, the veterans dashed off in the direction of the repair docks, outpacing J-CarDiv Two.

"Ma'am, what about our luggage?" One of the newcomers asked, beating Ayaka to the question.

"It'll be taken care of," Yorktown said. "All of you remembered to take out one change of clothes before forming up this morning?"

A flurry of activity followed before a unanimous "Yes, Ma'am."

"Good."

As they followed Yorktown through the base grounds, Ayaka pulled out her phone and considered the roaming icon.

===[===]===

Half a world away, Uileag's phone vibrated.

Discreetly, he fished for it and slid an eye off the lecture in progress to glance at the Line message that had come in.

"Have reached Japan. Long day. Talk tomorrow night. Love you"

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: WTB Ayane Sakura singing Slow Hand in the Shimakaze voice and Sumipe singing Country Roads in the Hiryuu and Souryuu voice.

The shipgirls' patronymics are based on their commanding officers as at commissioning, since getting the last CO was much harder.


	15. Chapter 14

Authors' Notes: We're back!

Well, we weren't quite gone, to be blunt; this was going through edits and revisions after receiving feedback from the readers at SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. Readers at AO3 and , it is recommended you go to either of those forums and follow the story there for first looks at new content.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 14

===[===]===

{Sun Araw - Deep Cover}

YouTube watch?v=A-s9LdQPXF4

It was the next morning before the maintenance cycles were done.

Ayaka carefully untangled herself and made sure her feet were securely under her before she rose from the repair berth, stretched, showered off the residue from the repair fluid and put on a fresh set of clothes. As she did so, she subconsciously noted and repressed amusement at the uneasiness of her fellows at having had to bare all. With that done, she joined the wave of hungry shipgirls headed for the officer's mess.

The basics of a Japanese breakfast were there, of course: A variety of immaculately-grilled fish with rice, soup laden with seaweed, tofu and vegetables, _natto_ and rolled omelette.

It smelt of home, even if the Shirokaze household had hardly been adverse to ham and other untraditional food back when Imamura had been intact, and Ayaka felt a tinge in her heart at missing out on the weekly meals with her family.

Branching out from the fundamentals, there were also stews, seafood, porridge, pickled dishes, noodles, grilled and fried meats and croquettes.

For those not enamoured with Japanese cuisine, there was also plenty on offer. Bacon and ham, bread and buns, cereal, eggs cooked in other styles, pancakes, patties, sausages, and waffles. The list went on, with all the trimmings.

For drinks, there were jugs of coffee, juice and milk and pots of tea black and green alike.

Yokosuka certainly hadn't skimped on the food for the newcomers despite their own supply crunch. Ayaka wondered how much of this largesse was due to the newly-arrived stocks they had just received.

Almost all the destroyers made an unrestrained charge for the meal line, feet stomping loudly and vibrating with impatience as they waited for the food to be dished out. When it finally came, some of them were hardly out of the queue before they started chomping down in a display of plate-juggling worthy of any high-end restaurant's well-trained waitstaff and muffled cries of "Arigathanks!" Admittedly, most of the bigger shipgirls weren't being good role models as it stood.

Ayaka was near the end of the line; when it was her turn, she contritely said in Japanese, {I'm very sorry about the destroyers' behaviour.}

{It's fine, it's fine!} The duty personnel doling out the food said, waving off her concern. {Americans are very energetic, aren't they?}

{Y-yes.}

With breakfast settled, the amalgam gathered outside the mess before heading for the admiral's office, passing through a set of guarded double doors as they did so, the guards calling in their presence.

They stopped before a door with a plate marked "COMD KANFLOT ONE", removed covers where applicable and Yorktown knocked.

"Enter."

They did.

{Westlife - I have a Dream}

YouTube watch?v=c_PoDIiGFqg

 _Kaishou-ho_ Shizuka Minami sat calmly in the Spartan office while the 18 members of the amalgam squeezed in. The woman had black hair and vivid blue eyes. Neither the placid expression on her face nor her white JMSDF uniform outwardly betrayed any sign of the stress that commanding a vital slice of her nation's defence despite the resource shortages must surely have been putting on her; Ayaka wondered how much of that was genuine and how much was the Japanese capacity for presenting a strong front that she herself had never mastered. The desk was aggressively ordered, as were the walls; though there were documents aplenty, there were no signs of any personal memorabilia except-

Ayaka couldn't resist the widening of her eyes at the solitary frame on the wall, a print bordered with repeats of TFV's emblem of a shield, on which sat a sword with wings and a banner with the word "VALKYAJA". It was a three-in-one of photos from the three Battles of Pearl Harbor, with the iconic shot of the stricken _Arizona_ at the top half, the moments from the more recent two forced to share the bottom half of the print.

Yorktown stepped forward, saluted and said, "Ma'am, Amalgam 55 reports."

Minami rose to her feet, returned the salute with a blossoming smile and said, "As you were. For the newcomers' benefits, I'm _Kaishou-ho_ Shizuka Minami, Commander, _Kanmusu_ Flotilla One (Yokosuka District). For reference, that's a NATO OF-7 equivalent. On behalf of _Kaishou_ Masaki Kamiki, Commander, Fleet _Kanmusu_ Force, welcome to Japan. We really cannot overstate the importance of the aid the US has been providing us."

"The pleasure is ours, Ma'am."

There was a series of beeps and a wall-mounted television filled up a progress bar. From Minami's lack of reaction, she had been expecting it. The bar resolved in turn into the TFV logo, the logo of the Department of the Navy and the NAVENSCIWARCOM mobius strip before showing RDML Abel.

"Exactly on time. Good."

"Admiral Abel, Ma'am!" Yorktown snapped back to attention and the rest of Uatu followed.

"Ladies, as you were." Abel nodded at them before facing Minami. "Hummer."

"Razor," Minami said. From the raised eyebrow, it seemed this part hadn't been expected. "You don't normally call. I haven't had the chance to thank you properly for the extra parts you got Iteration to spare us in the last round."

"Hmph. You're welcome. I thought I'd check in, reduce George's workload for a change."

"Really? You sure he didn't bribe you with the prospect of some of my _dango_? Or was it Jacky?"

"Perhaps." Without the slightest shift in her expression, Abel turned back to Uatu. "CAPT Zelben tells me you encountered complications?"

"Yes, Ma'am," Yorktown said. "The abyssal raiders sent a flanking force from the south. They've never done that before. We didn't see them coming until our southward security started taking fire."

"I understand the storm conditions meant the Triton's electro-optical was useless and its other sensors still can't penetrate the abyssals' low observability effect?"

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Apart from this addition to their tactics, was there any change in their demonstrated capabilities?"

"No, Ma'am."

"No new or upgraded unit types?"

"No, Ma'am. Didn't see any of those red aura types starting to appear in the South China Sea."

"Very well. I believe Mr Odd and Mr Rush's teams will still want to look into this new wrinkle nevertheless. Have you come up with countermeasure proposals?"

"Yes, Ma'am. We'll have the reports, footage and data in by today."

"See that you do." Abel paused to consult something offscreen, then nodded. "Right. Anything else, Hummer?"

"How much shore leave are you giving Uatu? The Settler of Debts says his superiors want something done about the Paracels now that your girls are up to full strength."

"I'm aware; Juliet Zulu did keep me in the loop. We'll need time to adjust the rest of the construct's deployment while Uatu is sortied. I don't foresee that happening any earlier than the day after tomorrow, and that's already optimistic."

"Fair enough."

"He said something about Mr Ishikawa?"

"Goldmine?" Minami took a moment to think. "Yes, I do believe Sasebo wants a dog in the race, and it's likely to be..." she frowned at Abel. "Really, who thought making the _Ninghai_ twins the liaison for that particular unit was a good idea?"

"An excellent question." Abel's face betrayed nothing.

"Indeed? In that case, we're good, Razor."

"I'll leave you to it then."

"Already? Ah, that's unfortunate. Tell George I'll have another batch of _dango_ out on the return leg. Until next time."

Abel's lips might have twitched slightly this once. "See you. Construct Three Actual out."

Abel's face winked out.

Minami turned back to Uatu. "As it stands, I don't have anything to add to what Razor said. Any concerns you'd like to raise?"

Yorktown turned to look at her unit. When no one said anything, she said, "No, Ma'am."

"Those who've been here before, finish your reports and other administrative matters and you can go on liberty. Remember to check with the regs before you do. As you've just heard, be sure to remain contactable. We'll call you in when it's needed. Newcomers, there've been some changes around here even if you might have visited in your previous life, so we thought you might want to get a quick tour of the facilities before you do that. Maya, please come in."

Shortly after, from a side door emerged a blue-eyed shipgirl with a X-shaped hairclip on the right side of her short brown hair. She wore a sleeveless, cleavage-baring blue sailor blouse with a white collar and red scarf, black gloves, white miniskirt with a red stripe, brown belt and pointy olive green boots.

{Yo, Admiral! Working hard? It's Hiiiiigh Noon!} She shouted, wearing a cocky grin.

Ayaka recognised the voice of the new shipgirl as [Bokukan]MayaSama1930, the Overwatch player with the loud victorious crowing in Japanese whose game Charybdis had been a spectator to back then. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Yorktown stiffen slightly, West Virginia scowl while uttering "No, it's not" and Oakland try to hide a matching grin with a whispered "Somewhere in the world."

{Like always.} Switching to English, she said, "We have newcomers for you to show around."

"Great! Another day for me to kick some ass!"

"Don't teach them the wrong things."

"When have I ever?"

"Yes, yes, go get your PUBG."

"POTG, Admiral."

"Yes, yes. Dismissed," Minami said, and the shipgirls filed out, Maya whistling a jaunty, triumphant tune as she did.

Ayaka and the handful of other newcomers stayed behind in the corridor outside the admiral's office as the rest of the amalgam began moving off, the other two battleships in the lead while the three carriers took rearguard. Maya jerked a thumb at herself and said, "Third of the _Takao_ -class heavy cruisers, Maya- _sama_! Kobe-built by Kawasaki." She bent forward and squinted at them. "Do I know any of you from the Solomon battles?"

They exchanged confused looks. "...no?"

"Hmph! No submarines, though. That's great. I was never good with them. Anyway, Takao- _nee_ and Atago- _nee_ aren't stationed here, so no _panpakapan_ s, I'm afraid. You'll have to settle for the Great and Powerful Maya- _sama_! Though at least you won't have to contend with that smelly green spiky fruit Takao- _nee_ likes, so that's something!" Her lip curled in disgust at the thought. "Now, I bet you want to know where I'm taking you! First, we'll visit the JEXRA facility."

There was the sudden thump of an heavy landing, and Maya and the newcomers turned to see Princeton, who had apparently jumped in surprise, suddenly sweating and looking nervous. "Well… you girls have fun! The Bubble, away!" She conjured a portal with her cane and ran through it in an undignified hurry.

"Hey, wait for us!" Yorktown shouted, sounding uncharacteristically frantic, as she dragged a worried Essex through the portal before it could close. Hammann, rushing back at the commotion, could only growl impotently and sigh as it shut before her eyes.

"W-w-what's up with them?" Spence asked. The fearful destroyer with her lilac locks and blue and white sleeveless sailor uniform had fastened herself to Ayaka's back and was trembling at the thought of whatever could terrify the carriers so.

"Heheheh, you'll see," Maya said, snickering enigmatically. "Let's go!"

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Shizuka Minami on loan from Salbazier. Thanks for the help in getting her right!

Our thanks too to Commander Error for assistance with Paris Abel's characterisation in the chapter. Sharp-eyed readers might recognise who she is.


	16. Chapter 15

Authors' Notes: Rest in peace, fallen of Nagasaki, on the 73rd anniversary of the atomic bombing.

We cannot into architecture

===[===]===

CHAPTER 15

===[===]===

As Maya led them away from the offices, she first pointed out the main office, the operations room, then the communications room. After that, she led them out of the administrative section, past the main docks, armoury and supply depot and then a plain-looking building stretching to the water's edge, one that seemed to radiate a gentle power, if that oxymoron made any sense. As they were walking past it to a building with JEXRA's names written in both English and Japanese, Maya suddenly said, "Actually, wait one." She turned back towards the building the party had just passed, and they were through the entrance and walking towards the reception area when-

"Hey, wait, doesn't that belong outdoors?"

Ayaka and the other newcomers stopped at the exclamation and turned around, belatedly noticing the small _torii_ gate they had passed under just after the main doors and the downsized _komainu_ statuettes. She reflexively siddled off to one side, took her hat off and bowed once.

"Technically, it's supposed to be, yes," Maya said. "It's complicated. Y'all know the original summoning process is Shinto-derived, right?"

"Uh-huh."

"Yeah, but no one wants to give the wrong impression that this is a shrine on government property. That way leads to _Kokka_ -sorry, you know it as State Shinto, _Tennoheika_ blah blah blahzai, and no one with a working brain wants to go back there even before Yamata. Fucking Yamata." Maya growled venomously and was halfway through hawking when she caught herself.

Repressing her revulsion at the cursed name, Ayaka examined the _torii_ , noting that it was a new work, with no signs of the wear and tear that indicated having been taken from elsewhere.

"Are we not supposed to bow like Ms Iowa, then?"

Ayaka froze and glacially turned to look at Maya like a deer in headlights.

"Eh, do whatever you want. This isn't actually a shrine," Maya said while waving her hand dismissively. She nevertheless did so before heading over to the duty yeoman at the counter, and some of them followed suit. {Yo, Kouji! Melon- _chan_ in now?}

{Morning, Maya- _sama_.} After looking it up, he said, {Sorry, she's not. She's doing something with torpedo acceleration reinforcement, if the memo is correct.}

{Aw, man! Never mind!} Turning back to the party, Maya said, "Yuubari isn't in, so the summoning chambers are locked. We'll just take a quick look at the outsides instead."

The destroyers flicking boredly at the plants and _shide_ streamers hanging from the _shimenawa_ rope festooning the lobby walls fell back into line as Maya led the way down a corridor to an antechamber with four large shutters along a wall and a ramp leading to a second storey with more doors. There was a salient smell of the sea, seemingly wafting out from beyond the shutters. There was also a long sink with a bunch of ladles around it by the entryway, as well as a bunch of seats and televisions - a waiting area, it seemed - and a set of double doors apparently leading to a warehouse. Wheel marks on the floor indicated the regular passage of some vehicles that a healthy amount of mopping had failed to properly clean up.

"Are we supposed to wash our hands as well?"

"If you want to bother," Maya said with a shrug. "Iowa, you're supposed to be a priestess, right?"

"Eh?!" Ayaka couldn't hide her surprise at being put on the spot like this. It was one thing to be quizzed by curious Noo Yorkas who'd never seen a Shinto shrine before when she was properly garbed and in the right frame of mind, but this whole not-a-shrine had left her off-kilter.

"Lanty said something about you being a _shinshoku_."

Thanks, Alice, Ayaka thought irritably.

"Go teach the munchkins the _misogi_ while I try to figure out which of these TVs is working, yeah?" Without waiting for a response, Maya went into the antechamber.

Forcing down a frown, Ayaka went over to the sink, called for the interested members of the party to watch, then picked up a ladle and used it to collect water from a tap before demonstrating how to use it to rinse the left hand, right hand and mouth.

"That's it?" Charles Ausburne, who hadn't bothered with the purification ritual but followed Maya straightaway into the antechamber, said in the meantime. The sandy-haired destroyer sounded unimpressed. "I thought there would be a lot more justice when you said it had to do with summoning."

"It rains from above in there, but we can't go in right now, so yeah," Maya said. "Don't imagine it'll be much different from what you have in your homeport, though." It was on the third snapping of her fingers at the televisions that one turned on. The screen showed a large room with a slope leading into water, a heavy gate like at a shipyard keeping the water-side exit barred, and a second-storey catwalk, currently unlit except by ambient natural daylight from windows. Something bugged Ayaka, who had finished supervising the purification rites, about the orientation of the building, but she couldn't figure out what.

"Why're two of them cordoned off?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah, that." Maya made a face. "They're not ready yet. Something about having higher-priority things to spend on than opening all four summoning slots. I let the bean counters and log people worry about that sort of thing. Anyway, the warehouse is just a warehouse, so that's all there really is to here. Let's go." She led the way out after turning the television off and into the JEXRA facility.

"Are Mr Tanaka and Mr Inoue here? I want to thank them for the Three Tango Indias!" Charles asked as they went in. She began energetically making flamethrower noises and gestures. Another shipgirl began using her hands to simulate a plane, making plane noises that degenerated into Wilhelm screams.

"Let me check," Maya said, then turned to the duty yeoman. {Yo, Aoki! Shio- _kun_ and Shini- _kun_ in today?}

{Morning, Maya- _sama_.} He regarded the party but briefly before turning to look it up. Ayaka wondered if exposure to other shipgirls and supernal oddities had inoculated these fellows to the sight, by the way he wasn't having more extreme a reaction to the rowdy nonregulation figures. {Sorry, Tanaka- _san_ and Inoue- _san_ aren't in now. Do you want to leave a message?}

"They're not in," Maya told the party. "Do you want to leave a message?"

"No need!"

{We're good. The munchkins will come back another time. Thanks!}

Maya led the way down a plain corridor to a door marked "Archaeobibliography", then kept on walking right past. "Ah, the boring department. Pass."

"W-what's that?" Spence asked.

Maya stopped, turned to her charges. "Books." She spat the word as if it were a particularly sour lemon. "The not-fun kind, where even the pictures are hard to understand. A lot of strange things in historical documents that might be hiding magical truth. That's what these guys look into. Most of this gets done by JEXRA Maizuru, but every base has a section." She resumed walking.

"Has anything come of it?"

Maya scratched her head without breaking stride. "Who was that… yeah, I think Chaldea's equiv has mentioned a couple of things. Cemal al-Hallaq, I think he was called, something something emperor of metals? Or Dr Roth and Dame Becker, something about this... Da'at Yichud?" Despite Maya's more than decent grasp of English, she tripped over the Hebrew words. "I don't understand it, and you probably won't need to either."

She pointed to the sign of the next main section. "The Foundry. You have one of your own, right?"

"Uh-huh!"

"We'll pass then. Now this, this is where the fun begins."

The sign above the doors said "Research and Execution".

"Execution?"

"Yup! Development implies a slow, long-term effort. Out here in these uncharted waters, fighting a foe that might be hiding who knows what else, we need to move fast. Now, don't touch anything."

"Yes, Lady Maya!"

Through the doors was an antechamber. A ramp led down to a basement but was currently cordoned off. "Danger: Excavation in progress", the sign said in English and Japanese. Maya went instead to the only other feature, another set of doors, and pushed past into a giant area crowded with equipment and people, tingling with Or Energy. Doctors, engineers and scientists were either hard at work on computers, tablets or tactile holograms or talking over things. Ayaka noted a pair of _gi_ -clad martial artists animatedly arguing with a refugee from 1950s sci-fi, as well as a monk and a Sadakoesque waif discussing some thick tome while a man in black with a gold lapel pin took notes. Where did all these specialists come from? She knew that, at least where BERND was concerned, there had been multiple rounds of verification to ensure that self-invitees weren't just quacks looking for a meal ticket. Surely if they had had something to prove, they wouldn't have waited till now to crawl out of the woodwork, but gone on… what was that skeptic's name? Randi? Unless there was something she was missing here.

Nearest to one of the doors at the far end, there was a _Yuugumo_ seated at a desk scowling at whatever she was working on. She had purple hair with a cowlick tied into a side ponytail with a red-edged white ribbon.

Maya made a beeline for her. "Fujinami- _chan_ , is Choukai in?"

"Ah, c'mon, I'm busy-" The destroyer looked up on them with yellow eyes and jumped in her seat. "Maya- _sama_! Yes, yes, Choukai- _san_ 's in right now! Should I call ahead?"

"No, we're good!" She pushed past the station and opened the door.

"Maya! You brought newcomers?" A female voice called out. "Let's see who you have there." She proceeded to name every member of the party.

"H-how?" Spence exclaimed. "No line of sight, I didn't get a radar warning!"

"Negative on active unveiling procedures either!"

"Your presence creates displacement and detectable phenomena, even when standing still under EMCON," the person said. "Disturbances in displaced air and gravimetry, heat, sound and other electromagnetic signatures, entropic mutability and quantum uncertainty, Or Energy movement along your supernal uplink. There's always a pattern, a picture of equations and vectors as unique as any thumbprint. Numbers are the fundament of the universe. Understand them, and you can understand everything."

As the explanation was being given, Maya led the way into another lab filled with devices Ayaka could hardly imagine the use of, laid out in an arrangement that probably made sense only to the one who had set it up.

Choukai had red eyes and long black hair and wore rimless spectacles. Her outfit was nearly identical to Maya's, except that she wore a black kneehigh and brown shoe on her left leg rather than the pointy olive green boots for both and had a knife tingling with the indicator for fairy-forging at her hip.

"So what's all this exactly?" Charles asked as Maya gave Choukai a one-armed hug while the latter was trying to stand and bow. "Looks very eggheadish."

"We're the link between them and them," Choukai said after Maya let go, looking away from a wall of holograms floating by her sides and back to point in the direction of Archaeobibliography and the Foundry respectively. "Turning ideas into usable spells, effects into causes. Working on the unified supernal theory that lets individualized spells become mass-teachable rotes regardless of foci differences. Converting rotes into producible hypertech that doesn't need an Enlightened user." Her station started chiming with notifications. "I'm sorry, duty calls."

"It's okay~" the destroyers chorused.

As she sat back down, Choukai asked, "Maya? Have you seen Yuubari- _san_?"

"What, she's not here either? Kouji said she was working on the TAR."

"I haven't seen her, no. Looks like I'll need to work on the AR datalink some other day. Can you please tie up Princeton- _san_ and bring her here? I need her insight on the Larson-Moore-Eick problem, but she keeps running away, and there are more urgent and useful things to do myself than catch her." She started hitting things on the holograms.

"I'll do just that!" Maya said with a hungry grin, her features betraying no sign of whether she truly understood what had just been said.

Choukai nodded, then looked over the newcomers and craned her head skyward to regard Ayaka. "Iowa- _san_ , I'll need to speak with you sometime about your Timeworking."

"Ah, yes?" Ayaka replied hesitantly.

"Good, I shall arrange a time later then." Choukai took a moment to grab a holographic object out of the windows around her and toss it at one of the machines in the lab, causing it to buzz, then said, "And, Maya, please bring Essex- _san_ here too. I need more data from other foci on Fateworking to work on entropic/temporal countermeasures."

"Leave it to me!" Turning to the party, Maya asked, "Any questions, kids?"

One hand came up. "Are you working on that Silver Ladder thing, Ms Choukai?"

"Me? No, not directly," Choukai said. "You'll have to ask JEXRA Ominato. They're the ones working with Profs Shirakawa and Tomizawa from the Hachinohe Institute of Technology, our foremost experts on dimensional studies and the Tsukinoe-Watase Theorem years before any of us came back."

"Okay!"

"If any of you have a strong grasp of DSci or Spirit, they'd appreciate any help you can offer on Ezo."

"Anything else?" Maya asked.

This time, there was nothing.

"Right! We won't bother you any longer then!" Maya slapped Choukai on the shoulder, then led the way out, waving goodbye to Fujinami as she did so.

"Ms Maya?" Spence asked as they were leaving R&E.

"Huh?"

"I-I still don't see why Ms Princeton and Yorktown are so scared of Ms Choukai? She seems nice."

"Of course my smart little sister is nice! Why… why… you know we all have issues, right?" Maya asked, suddenly contemplative.

"Y-yes."

"Even those who survived to the end of the war?"

Spence shivered again even as the rest of the party declared assent, and Ayaka was abruptly reminded that she had been one of the ships that hadn't made it to VJ Day.

"Especially those who survived where so many others didn't make it?"

"Uh-huh."

"So! You girls know that Princeton sunk because of a fire and now she's a pyromaniac?"

Scattered nods.

"Who knows how my little sister sunk?"

Shrugs and silence.

"Here's a touching story. Once upon a time, there was a place called Samar. Tago- _nee_ and I were gone and Takao- _nee_ would never fight again. That left Choukai to be BEATEN… BY A LITTLE GIRL?!" Maya shouted, causing the party to jump. "Oh yeah, there was a bandit who had to get the final word in, blew her butt up, but everyone fixates on 'lost to a Combustible Vulnerable Expendable'. Nice bankable story, no survivors. The end."

Ayaka couldn't tell whether it was Maya's delivery or the thought of being lost with all hands that prompted Spence to plant her face in Ayaka's dress and start blubbering, but the rest had not been spared; some of them teared up too, and even Charles was unable to hold back a horrified gasp.

"Okay, there were some, but then the destroyer that picked them up - that was Fujinami- _chan_ back there - went down with all hands shortly after, thanks Sexy Lady."

Another set of fearful winces.

"It's all peachy though. You live, you die, you live again, and this time you git gud. Like so." Maya had found a tablet while speaking and opened a video titled "Choukai Cuts all the Carriers (Volume 2)". "Behold!"

Ayaka put her hands over Spence's ears, suddenly filled with a high degree of certainty that the skittish destroyer probably shouldn't be watching what was about to follow.

The cheery strains of Offenbach's Can Can started.

So did a clip of Choukai slashing open a Wo's throat with her knife, ichor flying like paint off an artist's brush just as Fairbairn and Sykes would have had it.

Cut.

Choukai hurled a brace of torpedoes at a Nu-class light carrier, the stubby Hellspawn looking like little more than an ambulatory version of a Wo's headgear, and they caught the shells it was firing on the way out. The explosions sent the abyssal hurtling through the air, falling right towards another Nu that had been disabled earlier on, and Choukai was already there, raised heel falling on them both like Susanoo no Mikoto smiting Yamata no Orochi. Even as the water exploded up around them, she kept on stomping, not placing a foot wrong even as she began weaving around and retaliating against shots from unseen foes.

Cut.

Choukai dodged a swing of a Wo's staff and used the momentum from the whiff, aikido-like, to grab and pull the offending arm while slicing it open down the block, released it so she could sidestep into a half Nelson on the unaffected arm and unerringly slipped the knife between the structural members rendered as ribs again and again as the abyssal convulsed and bled freely with every strike.

Cut.

Choukai split a Wo open vertically down its gut, then grabbed and spun it around so a would-be rescuer ended up shredding now-exposed internals instead, even as her own cannons took out the helpful monster in return.

Cut.

As Ayaka watched the chain of carrier carnage progress with a lack of horror she could only describe as worryingly muted, Charles and the majority of the party cooing and squealing in a steadily more raptured manner at the maulings they would not have been allowed into a cinema for, the tactical part of her mind started to notice a difference in how Choukai was taking out her targets. There was dispassionate dispatching where most abyssal ship types were concerned, one salvo one sinking. Even the planes got methodically marked and executed in synchronised volleys.

As for the carrier types proper, though… well.

Pulling a Vlad Tepes on a Wo with its own staff did count as a bit excessive… didn't it?

"That's my smart little sister for you!" Maya said proudly after the video finished to cheers and applause and she put away the tablet.

"So… Much… JUSTICE!" Charles exclaimed. "That's why Ms Yorktown and the others ran so far away?"

"Exactly! There is a very good reason why we all work so hard whether out on the sea or in the lab, though."

As they left the JEXRA building, it finally clicked for Ayaka that the gate to the water in the summoning chamber was oriented to catch the setting sun.

As they were led past the main helipad, Ayaka noticed a Skyranger among the Seahawks, albeit in JMSDF colours with a TFV patch, and found herself reminded about what Admiral Minami had said about Iteration sparing parts, as well as RADM Adams's and CAPT Zelben's comments about the resurgent isolationist sentiments post-New York.

She could see where they were coming from. The raid on New York City, coming a mere four months after the New Date of Infamy, had served as a clear reminder that the abyssals could hit the CONUS at any time. Many had been left running scared and jolted into reconsidering the USA's defence agreements with its allies, and it was a sentiment hardly limited to her fellow (ex-)country folk traditionally opposed to the international neoliberal capitalist order and what it had done to local industry. All that global power projection, after all, was a fat lot of good if the US couldn't even protect itself. More erudite minds could even go beyond the personal anecdotes and point to blowback from past aid (or some say enemy of my enemy) arrangements like with the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s as reasons not to give anything from Iteration to the Chinese, Russians and rest of VALKYRIE's constituent nations.

That said, just because she could empathise didn't mean she agreed. She didn't know whether it was her background - both of them - or the officer course talking, but it seemed clear to her that just as a person was a member of a community with duties and obligations to it, so too was the US part of the global community and required to honour its commitments. More practically, any foe that could treat capships as expendable probably wasn't one the US could try to hunker down and beat in a contest of production, especially since there wasn't any obvious way to get to some paper-hanging SOB and shoot it in the face.

No, sharing the fruits of research, in the hope that whatever mankind put together might lead to a path to victory, was the only way forward.

Past the repair baths, back into the main building, Maya led the way to a room without a door, one seemingly featureless from afar except for litter on the floor. There was a JMSDF man standing there by himself, leaning heavily forward, head down, hand outstretched and touching one of the walls. As he left the room, bowing slightly to Maya and the party, Ayaka noted that he should have been around her age, but his hollow-eyed look and slightly-slumped form made him seem much older. When one entered the room, looked at the walls closely, words could be seen engraved on them.

No, not words, Ayaka realised with a start.

Names, and the "litter" was nothing so crass. Here a print of a hasty snapshot taken at some pub, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young men and women who would never smile or drink again; there a tear-stained note from the survivors of a section on board a ship of the 7th Fleet that had been dragged to the depths by abyssal firepower. Flowers and empty glasses, offerings to the lost.

The placement of the room was inspired; near enough to the main corridor it was off of that it could not be missed, far enough to offer a modicum of quiet to those who were missing.

"Here, on the memorial wall, we remember the fallen," Maya said, head bowed, voice soft and reverent, not a hint of her usual brashness to be seen.

Ayaka and those who wore headgear removed it and the party joined her. Spence whimpered; even Charles and the other rowdy ones held their tongues.

"Sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. Every last one the best of us. American and Japanese alike, they who were stationed here gave to the last; this is the least we can do to honour them. May their sacrifice not be in vain."

All Ayaka could think of was how close Uileag had come to ending up just another entry on a similar memorial; half a year on, it still was clear in her mind.

They held the bowed silence for a minute before Maya straightened up and they left.

After this, Maya led the way to a gym, where shipgirls and normal sailors alike were watching an ongoing kendo spar. One of the _kendoka_ was breathing heavily enough that his body betrayed it even through his _bogu_ ; his smaller opponent, whose back was to the door the party had entered through, was graciously giving him the chance to get a grip despite not being as weary, or at least doing a better job of hiding it.

"Ah, it's almost over. Hurry up and get seated!" Maya told the party.

After a few more moments, the weary practitioner straightened up and raised his _shinai_ back into a guard position. At a nod from an older man holding a small flag in each hand, he advanced, the two tapping their blades experimentally against each other once, twice, thrice-

The big one made to strike, and the small one swiftly parried his blade just enough to get it out of the way, before hitting him on the right side of the head with the backswing. The referee raised a flag in favour of the small one.

The big one tried to strike again, and the small one stepped aside enough for the strike to meet only air before rapping him on the wrist and side of the head.

The third time, the big one tried to let the small one strike first. His opponent simply laid into his side, twisting to spoil his belated counterattack.

The referee raised his flag one last time, and it was over. The two fighters bowed to each other and stepped off the mat to applause, heading to the side of the gym where they put down their _shinai_ before taking off their gear.

{You were so cool, Naganami- _neesama_!} A _Yuugumo_ Ayaka belatedly recognised as Takanami shouted as she ran down from the spectator seats.

Huh.

{Of course, Takanami!} Naganami said as she turned to return her sister's hug. Without the face-hiding _men_ that she had bound her hair to wear, the destroyer was easy to recognise.

Ayaka stared at the _tare_ Naganami was wearing, unable to shake the thought that there had been something off about the destroyer's confident pronouncement. The kanji on the crotch protector said "Nagamine" and eyes trained by a lifetime of working with thread noticed the slight fraying that told her the protective gear had been in use for easily more than half a year.

Curious.

"Akizuki, Teruzuki, with us!"

Two thin, almost painfully gangly destroyers in similar outfits, accompanied by a pair of animate turrets each, blinked owlishly at Maya's shout. They wore black headbands with "DesDiv 61" in gold kanji, black-collared white short-sleeved sailor blouses with orange scarfs over grey corsets, and black and white gloves. One of them had short black hair and dark brown eyes. She wore a white miniskirt, white kneehighs and grey and red boots. Her turrets were smiling. The other had blue eyes and light brown hair that ended in two braids with propeller-shaped ties. She wore a black miniskirt, white over-kneehighs and red boots. Her turrets wore cocky grins, with one even holding a shell clenched in its teeth like a cigar.

"Next is lunchtime!" Even as the adjudicator called Naganami and the man who had been her opponent over, Maya took hold of the two _Akizuki_ -class destroyers by the forearm and began dragging them out of the gym to the giggles of the sailors and other shipgirls there. The rest of the party fell in behind her.

{Ah, Maya- _sama_ , we can't take so much!} They gestured frantically as Maya instructed the duty personnel at the food line to pile more stuff onto their trays.

{Nonsense! There's plenty to go around with the food aid ships having come in again!} Maya punctuated her words with the provision of another dish.

{We need to leave some for Hatsuzuki- _chan_ and the others!}

{I tell you, it's fine! The ships bound for Sasebo must have reached by now.}

{But…}

{You don't want to displease our benefactors, do you?} There was an abruptly sharp edge to Maya's voice.

The two of them shivered and shrunk in on themselves. {No!}

{Be good ducks, then, and eat up!} Maya promptly shoved some omelette into their mouths.

"Here's our training area," Maya announced after taking the party through a few more places.

On the water near the shore, there was a circuit of flags set up on buoys that shipgirls were doing slaloms around. The light cruiser overseeing the session was playing music from her external speakers.

"Need for Speed?" Maya shouted. "Ah, I see you're a woman of culture as well!"

"Thank you, Maya- _sama_!"

Maya next led them to the firing range, which was already in use.

The building's interior was exactly as advertised. Imamura's schools had had traditional archery ranges, so Ayaka knew what they looked like even if she'd never actually picked _kyuudou_ up in earnest. They signed in with the range safety officer and went out to the actual firing area, which extended out onto the water and had an elaborate system to simulate maneuvering targets at various distances.

"Hiryuu, Souryuu! How's it going?" Maya shouted.

"Ah, Maya- _sama_!" Hiryuu said cheerily, sleeve flapping as she waved.

Souryuu's face was taut with concentration as she carefully finished drawing back her bow and letting the arrow fly. She took a moment to scrutinise where it had hit on the target's bullseye before turning to face the party. "Maya- _sama_."

"I see you brought nuggets," Hiryuu went on with that peculiar hint of a Russian accent in her English.

"Yup! You've met, right?"

"Fluffy dragons!" The destroyers sang.

"At your service," the two carriers said with flourishing bows, lowering their weapons to relaxed positions as they did so.

"Show them the thing, wouldja?" Maya asked.

Souryuu looked at Hiryuu and launched into the kind of silent gesturing that implied they were using magic-secured private comms. Eventually, Souryuu said, "Fortunately, we are topped up and good to go."

"Do you need us to hold your sake?" Charles asked, and the rest echoed while giggling.

"No, but Tamon-maru does need you to watch!" Hiryuu replied.

"We do drink beer, you know," Souryuu said. "Have you tried any Sharky's yet?"

Ayaka had to silently remind herself once more that, despite appearances, even the youngest of them was more than 70 years old. She and her fellow Natural Borns in her class at MDL had had to go for seminars on coping with their Reawakenings, and included had been stern reminders not to judge their Summoned/Manifested comrades by the same metrics regarding age-appropriate behaviour one applied to normals.

It was something that didn't really stick.

"Right! Let's get this underway!" Hiryuu made handsigns at the range safety officer, who hurried to his computer and began inputting things and speaking into a handset. As he did so, the drones that had been moving the targets around flew away. Eventually, he gave the all-clear.

Auras flickered to life around the two carrier shipgirls, orange with a brown border for Hiryuu and green with a blue border for Souryuu, and they exploded in motion with the surety and precision borne of long hours of practice further honed by combat, bows flying into position as they fluidly drew, notched and fired arrows.

" _Ryuu ga waga teki wo kurau!_ "

There was a loud roar eclipsing their shout, the kind you felt in your bones as much as actually heard aurally, and a pair of giant spectral Japanese dragons, one orange and one green, burst from the arrows that had been fired and quickly disappeared into the distance. In their wake, only disintegrated targets could be seen.

"COOL!" Charles and most of the destroyers were reduced to incoherent squealing at the sight.

The sight sent an abruptly all too explicable shiver down Ayaka's spine, but she forced herself to join in the older shipgirls' applause. At least it wasn't red and blue with a purple trail.

"Now, we would actually do this at combat separation and let it go out to its full range-" Hiryuu started.

"-but that doesn't actually change anything for the purposes of this demonstration." Souryuu finished.

"Bye bye, bandits!" They said together.

After bidding the dragons goodbye, Maya now led the way to the quartermaster, where the group picked up its luggage, keys and a variety of other items and took them to the dormitories. While looking around along the way, Ayaka noticed a lonely-looking corridor with what looked like a bench and a pair of toilets along it.

"Just dump your bags and come back out!" Maya said. "The tour might be almost over but your day isn't!"

As it turned out, the room Ayaka had been assigned in the capital ship dorms had a scrupulously ordered fellow occupant. Everything was laid out neatly, without even a carelessly thrown-about top, and the only obvious signs of personalisation were two photo frames. One held a photo of Uatu from an earlier, incomplete stage and the other was a photo of three carriers that she belatedly recognised as _Yorktown_ -class flat tops.

Well now.

After everyone gathered outside the dorms once more, Maya eventually led the way to the offices, pointing out the briefing rooms as she did so.

"Aw, do we have to?" Charles asked, whining.

"Well, what can you do?" Maya said resignedly. "This is the long stretch of boredom part of war. I swear, there's a special place in Izanami no Mikoto's court for anyone who actually enjoys paperwork." Looking at the crestfallen shipgirls, something seemed to come to mind, and she added, "You know what, who wants to watch Fury Road?!"

A clamour of "me, me, me" immediately rang out.

"We're in agreement then! Paperwork is MEDIOCRE, so you'd better not be! Do it well and do it fast, and you will be awaited in Valhalla, where you will sail eternal, shiny and chrome! WITNESS!" She pointed determinedly.

"WITNESS!" The shipgirls shouted back and immediately stampeded in without a further word.

Maya watched them make tracks for a while longer before she turned around to regard the two people who hadn't shared in their enthusiasm. "Not a fan?"

"Mis-sorry, Lady Maya, er…" Spence hesitantly detached herself from Ayaka to walk over. Casting a fearful eye about her surroundings, she whispered in Maya's ear.

Whatever she had said, it caused Maya to nod empathetically. "I know how that feels. Don't worry, I know just where to get what you need!" She rubbed the other shipgirl's back soothingly. "Find me after dinner!"

"T-thanks!" With that, she turned and headed into the office.

{It's not exactly my cup of tea,} Ayaka said once the other American was in, a hand to her sidelock.

Maya went very still for a moment, turned slowly to regard Ayaka with an expression somewhere between a grimace and "dafuq". "Say again?"

{Mad Max isn't my cup of tea,} Ayaka said.

Maya continued staring warily at Ayaka for a few more tense moments before relaxing and letting out an audible sigh of relief at no longer having to struggle with English. {Is that so? You'd want to bother the Unlucky Tea Ceremony instead then.}

{The-oh. Souryuu- _san_ said something about Fusou- _san_ , right?}

{Exactly! You couldn't have missed the tea room.}

Did she-oh. {That corridor we passed by with the lonely bench?}

{That's the one!}

{I shall, then. Thank you.}

As Ayaka was heading into the office, though, she could swear she faintly felt Maya's radar on her back, heard her say with unusual gravity in the distant way that indicated thinking aloud, {I don't know why anyone wants to spend time with those repressed weirdos, though. Even Yams only feeds barely up to her need with no buffer. The _Hayai_ Harlot might be as great an ass as she has one, but she's just terrible about showing concern; the repair baths only mitigate the hunger, and none of us wants to risk frenzy at the wrong time because you botch trying to tough it out on will alone.}


	17. Chapter 16

**===[===]===**

CHAPTER 16

===[===]===

After finishing her reports and getting the relevant information extracted, Ayaka left the offices and headed back towards the dormitory area in search of the corridor allegedly leading to the tea room.

It was surprisingly unintrusive; with all the corridors crisscrossing the base, far too many of which Ayaka still didn't know the endpoint for, another unmarked one easily went almost unnoticed.

Ayaka rounded the corner at the end and froze. To one side, the wall opened to reveal a small room laid out with tatami mats, currently unoccupied. The base's concrete flooring abruptly gave way further down the path to a miniature _roji_ tea garden of moss and rock. Following the rock path saw it terminate at a _chashitsu_ facade in the authentic _sukiya-zukuri_ style, complete with a _tsukubai_ stone water basin and a _nijiriguchi_ , the small entrance to the room proper. She found herself wondering where the budget or space for the thing had come from; it wasn't regulation, unless she was badly mistaken.

Ayaka paused again at the _nijiriguchi_ after washing her hands and mouth and removing her sandals, a hand on the wall it was part of, subconsciously noting that it actually felt the part. Traditionally, it was utter impropriety to enter a _chadou_ midway. This wasn't exactly normal circumstances, though so she hoped she could be forgiven for the intrusion.

She knocked on the wall.

{Persona 5 Original Soundtrack - King, Queen and Slave}

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Almost immediately, a gentle voice wafted out, speaking English. "Please come in."

Ayaka bent low to enter. It wasn't like her fuzzy memories of Panamaxing - the opening had more room for that, probably enough for a _Yamato_ or _Montana_ if their anthropomorphised physiques were larger proportionate to her own as their original hulls would have been to hers - but it was still a fairly tight fit.

The tea room was small, plain and short, the low ceiling barely tall enough for her to stand up in. There was a _tonkoma_ alcove with a painting and a _chabana_ flower arrangement, but no other furniture. The windows were covered with _shoji_ and the small _mizuya_ pantry was obscured by a curtain.

" _Shitsureishimasu_ ," Ayaka said once she was inside the tea room proper with its tatami mats, bowing apologetically. "I'm very sorry I'm late."

She was promptly greeted by the sight of West Virginia. The _Colorado_ was a picture of elegance, hands folded primly in her lap and eyes shut, or at least she would have been if not for how she was twitching silently in place, beads of sweat visible. The anger thankfully didn't seem to be directed at her. Ayaka had to wonder if sitting in _seiza_ didn't suit the older battleship, even taking into account the usual discomfort felt by people who weren't used to the position. A tea ceremony was supposed to be calming, but it didn't seem to be having that effect on her. During the convoy operation, the battleship had grumbled from time to time about being obliged to play nice regarding these Japanese culture things; evidently, for all her Jane's profile had her talk about not begrudging the past, actively making nice was a bridge too far.

To West Virginia's right, moving counterclockwise around the room, Maryland was staring blankly at the wall opposite. Ayaka couldn't see what was so interesting about the bare wall, which remained unadorned even after throwing up unveiling procedures. She looked at Ayaka briefly, nodding to acknowledge her presence, then went back to staring at the wall.

Further counterclockwise was what appeared to be a young Japanese woman with a pagoda mast ornament on the right side of her left-parted short black hair. Her red eyes were locked morosely on the floor slightly ahead of herself, hands fidgeting. There was something about her looks that inexplicably bothered Ayaka. She was wearing what had evidently started as a _miko_ outfit, but the long sleeves on the white kimono top over a red inner layer had come detached, and the red hakama skirt had shrunk into a miniskirt. Ayaka found it hard to resist curling her lips at the sight. The top, which was held together with a black _obi_ , also had a black epaulette on each shoulder, with a gold aiguillette falling from the one on the right shoulder and disappearing into her top at chest level. A red strap around her right thigh and white _tabi_ completed the outfit.

This was Yamashiro? Ayaka wondered if West Virginia's irritation was a reaction to how much bare leg the Japanese battleship and erstwhile victim had on display.

That meant that the last person in the room, who was also the host, was…

" _Nee-sa...ma_?" Yamashiro abruptly asked as she belatedly looked up at Ayaka, confusion creeping into her voice.

The fourth shipgirl was kneeling in perfect _seiza_ form with closed eyes, the very picture of poise. A _furo_ portable brazier sat in front of her and the rest of the tea ceremony equipment was laid out neatly beside her. She wore a similar outfit to Yamashiro except that she had long hair and the pagoda mast ornament, thigh strap and hair parting were on were the opposite side. Ayaka had been looking at her when she became abruptly aware that both West Virginia and Yamashiro were staring.

"Sorry?"

The two battleships in question looked with eerie synchronicity from her to Fusou and back a few times before saying together, "Are you sure you aren't related?"

"Sorry?" Ayaka repeated, even as the two of them realised what they had been doing and exchanged a glare.

"Did you do something to your face or hair? I distinctly remember you looking this morning more like one of us than one of… them." West Virginia gestured at Fusou and Yamashiro.

"Eh?" Ayaka took a closer look, locking eyes with Fusou's newly-opened ones, even as her hands unconsciously rose to her bangs. She did look like a long-lost cousin, albeit obviously Japanese, Ayaka had to admit. There was enough red in Ayaka's eyes that their eye colours would even look identical under the right lighting. With that in mind, it was now apparent why Yamashiro's appearance had bothered her.

Maryland discreetly nudged West Virginia.

"Where are my manners?" West Virginia cleared her throat, trying to plaster a more neutral expression over her usual scowl. "Fusou, first of the _Fusou_ -class battleships, this is Iowa, first of the _Iowa_ -class battleships."

"Pleased to meet you. I'll be in your care," Ayaka said, bowing.

If Fusou was surprised by the sight, she didn't betray it in the slightest, bowing back. "Welcome. My pleasure to meet you too. Please be seated." There was a hint of Kyoto in her accent.

Ayaka obliged and lowered herself onto her knees, then began sliding over to West Virginia's left.

"There's no need to be such a stickler for protocol and do that," West Virginia, teeth barely audibly grinding as she tried to moderate her tone.

Ayaka mentally corrected the likely source of irritation to be the sheer Japaneseness of the vicinity. Evidently this wasn't the kind of tradition West Virginia had had in mind.

Maryland's lips drew into a thin line at that, but she didn't say anything aloud. Yamashiro, on the other hand, exercised no restraint regarding her disapproving glare.

Fusou didn't seem the slightest bit bothered as she carried out the steps of the _chadou_. Retrieving the existing cups, serving a new tray of _wagashi_ sweets, cleaning and laying out every piece of _chadougu_ in the precise positions prescribed, preparing and serving the thick tea, _koicha,_ followed by the thin tea, _usucha_ , everything was done with an effortless familiarity and grace that didn't seem the slightest bit begrudging of the need to prompt her guests whenever a beat was inevitably missed.

Ayaka had to confess she was one of the hindrances. She couldn't say for certain what size the ancestral hometown had been before the Schism - thanks Mayugoro - but she was fairly sure no teacher of _temae_ had come with the founding mothers to Imamura, for there had been no tea ceremony school in the town. Fortunately, Fusou had been gracious enough to not point out that she did not know the way.

After the _usucha_ was served and the formal bits concluded, Maryland said, "You forgot one thing, Wee Vee."

"I did?" West Virginia stared incredulously.

"Yes." Turning to Ayaka, she said, "Iowa, we were telling our hosts about how the two of you are alike."

The tea was obviously made from high-quality leaves and there was just the right amount of bitterness and air to it that spoke of the brewer's extensive experience in the art, but all that was lost in the swirl of Ayaka's bewilderment. "Nn?"

Maryland extended a hand to Fusou, who bowed. "Harumi Nakahara, _shinshoku_ of the Mizuryu Shrine in Kyoto City, Kyoto Prefecture, enshrining Oowatatsumi no Kami. My pleasure to meet you."

"M-Mizuryu?! You're a Natural Born too?!" Ayaka gasped at the thought of being in the presence of a major shrine's priestess and had to work to force her mouth shut. "Ah, I-I mean, Ayaka Godai, _shinshoku_ of the New Shirokaze Shrine currently in New York, New York, enshrining Shitori no Kami Takehazuchi no Mikoto, who we also address as Musubi no Kami! My pleasure to meet you too!"

"This is getting out of hand. Now there are two of them," West Virginia muttered testily, brows furrowed.

"Musubi no Kami? Which one?"

Ayaka tried not to frown. "It's… complicated."

As she had learnt at Kokugakuin, there were quite a few different understandings of " _musubi_ ". There was what she had been taught by her grandmother, that it was about the union of people and objects. There was a Musubi no Kami that was a _kamisama_ of matchmaking, love and marriage, who might be the same as or conflated with the Chinese deity Yue Lao, but wasn't traditionally considered to have dominion over time. There was another _kamisama_ commonly invoked for matters of love, Okuninushi no Mikoto, but whether the two were linked was unknown. There was also the problem that outside the Shirokaze, it seemed nobody linked either Shitori no Kami or Ame no Kagaseo with _musubi_. Furthermore, there was another conception of _musubi_ , written with different characters from what she had first learnt, that covered a variety of mystical workings of creation and development. In turn, there were a number of other _kamisama_ in the Kojiki with this _musubi_ in the name, such as Takamimusubi no Kami who had been involved in various vital heavenly communications and might have been later conflated with the Musubi no Kami she knew. There was also Kamimusubi no Mioya no Kami, whose links with Izumo might explain why there were Izumo-derived elements in the Shirokaze practices as fillers post-Mayugoro. There were probably other things she was forgetting, but long story short, there were a lot of intricacies she was still grappling with even years on.

Nothing to do with the musubi Hawaiians ate, though. That was just delicious.

She must have failed at repressing the frown. "My apologies. I shouldn't have put you on the spot. Please, relax," Nakahara told Ayaka with a dainty smile.

"Y-yes. Mizuryu? I went to Kyoto 4 years ago while at Kokugakuin and visited it; might we have met before?"

"I doubt so, I'm afraid."

"Ah." Ayaka hesitated, wondering if she might be too blunt with what she was about to say, then blundered ahead anyway. "Other You has… interesting ideas on clothing, doesn't she?"

"Oh, this?" Nakahara gestured at her own outfit. "Yes, it would appear so. Wouldn't it, Yamashiro?"

"Yes, _Nee-sama_ ," Yamashiro said gloomily. "The vestments of the _miko_ , worn to serve the _kamisama_ , perverted into a prurient fantasy... such is our misfortune."

West Virginia started nodding in agreement, then caught herself abruptly, a look of horror flashing over her paling face.

It could have been worse, Ayaka thought to herself. Her overactive imagination unhelpfully supplied her mental images of the two _Fusou_ s in elaborately-designed _oiran_ -style black and red kimono, albeit skirtless and leaving very untraditional amounts of cleavage and sideboob on display, and she had to fight back a grimace. Also, the imagined _Fusou_ s were catgirls for some reason.

Nakahara looked back at Ayaka. "Gifu?"

Ayaka started. "Is it that obvious?"

"There's a hint of the Chubu dialects when you get nervous."

"Oh…"

"Really? I can't tell," Maryland said.

"It's quite subtle, not something most non-Japanese can detect," Nakahara said. "I was a bit unsure."

"Yes, my ancestors were indeed from Gifu's Hida region, but we no longer know exactly where."

"Why is that?" Maryland asked.

"My ancestors, after their arrival on North American shores, eventually founded a small town called Imamura, and it was there I was born. Around 200 years ago, though, the bathroom of a sandalmaker now only remembered as Mayugoro caught fire and it spread rapidly-"

"What? A bathroom caught fire?" West Virginia asked incredulously.

"Yes. I don't know how, but it grew out of control; by the time it had been extinguished, the very first local Shirokaze Shrine had been burned down, along with almost all the records."

"To be remembered only for one's failings, what a sorry legacy," West Virginia said.

"The name and location of the ancestral hometown, the meanings and origins of our practices, what the Great Schism that led to our leaving was about, why we ran so far away, who or what Imamura was and why the town was named for it, what contacts we must have had with the early French or Spanish colonists - all those lost in time, like tears in the rain."

"Time to die," Maryland cut in automatically.

"What little my ancestors manage to recover or write down once more, that too was lost in the Cometfall."

"Comet?" Confusion marred Nakahara's face. "I'm not familiar with that."

"It's okay if you don't," Ayaka said, perhaps a bit sharply. "October 4th, 2013, the latest perigee of the comet Fafnir's 1,200-year orbital cycle. It was no dream, and when a splinter wiped Imamura off the map, it was so much more than a breathtaking view."

Nakahara peered intently into her teacup before looking back up. "If I'd ever heard about it, I forgot. I'm sorry."

"No, no, I understand," Ayaka said, trying to smile it away. "It wasn't like Tohoku 2011 or Kansai or Chugoku 2018 with major, prominent damage. Just a small town in the middle of nowhere, with no dead despite the catastrophe, no bleeding so it's not surprising that it didn't lead. Still…" The sight of the dragons from earlier in the day crossed her mind then, and her eyes widened in realisation. "We'd always held that Shitori no Kami had vanquished the heavenly snake Ame no Kagaseo, and yet when a comet bearing the name of a dragon drew near, we failed to connect the dots until it was too late."

Before she could stew overmuch on having been blind to the signs, Maryland asked, "Regarding what Wee Vee said, could one of your ancestors have married into Fusou's birth lineage?"

Ayaka's face scrunched up as she thought, though she was grateful for the distraction. "Bluntly, I don't know. I doubt it was a cadet branch of one of my ancestors pre-Schism; Gifu to Kyoto might be a matter of hours today, but it would not have been a trip made lightly centuries ago. Then there's marrying into a different line, which is even less trivial."

Nakahara nodded in agreement. "There are high-level commonalities between shrines, but Shinto doesn't have a one true holy book that prescribes strict universal laws like the Abrahamic religions do. Have I said this before?"

"You might have," Maryland said. "Orthopraxic instead of orthodoxic - the focus is on sound practice rather than doctrine."

"Yes. That said, a lot of clerical lineages, presumably including Godai- _san_ 's, take seriously keeping the full extent of their unique practices and rituals esoteric and exclusive. Some do this even within themselves, passing everything down to only one designated heir and giving only limited instruction to the… spares?"

"An heir and a spare, yes, that's the saying," Maryland said.

"One of the Shirokaze women - and it's women because no Shirokaze has had a son in at least seven generations, based on what Gran's great-grandmother told her - leaving the town to marry out and taking even a slice of our practices away would have been bad enough," Ayaka said, taking up the thread. "Outright defecting to another shrine? Unthinkable. I would have known, because surviving records or not she would be cursed to the depths for bringing such dishonor to us."

"Unless such a person was subject to _damnatio memoriae_ ," West Virginia said.

"There's that," Ayaka had to reluctantly concede. "If it was any time more recent, I wouldn't know either because we've had no success reconnecting with our cousins."

Nakahara looked contemplative. {Maybe…}

" _Nee-sama_?" Yamashiro asked.

"Erm, Godai- _san_ , could it be the other way around?" Nakahara asked.

"Eh?"

"I was a bit confused when I saw the _kumihimo_ in your hair, especially after you said you were from Hida. Iga is known for _kumihimo_ , but Hida is not. Kyoto is, though. Maybe it was one of my ancestors who left for Hida and became the husband to one of yours, and he brought _kyo-kumihimo_ with him?"

Ayaka didn't bother keeping doubt off her face. "I don't know. If we braided and wove these cords as part of our unique observances, then it's possible that it wouldn't have spread to the people at large. It wouldn't have to be imported from anywhere."

"Oh… Still, there must be a reason why we look alike. I'll go see if my family records go back far enough, maybe ask my contacts in Jinja Honcho if they could help find out about your cousins?"

"The Association of Shinto Shrines may not be of any help," Ayaka said. "Before the Cometfall, neither Gran nor Great-Gran before her saw the need to join it."

"How troublesome, _Nee-sama_."

"It's okay, Yamashiro. It won't hurt to try."

The conversation turned to other matters; as evening approached, the two _Colorados_ excused themselves, West Virginia with barely-disguised eagerness.

{Is something wrong, Godai- _san_?} Nakahara asked in Japanese.

Ayaka turned back to face her fellow priestess-cum-shipgirl from where she had been watching the other two depart through the _nijiriguchi_. "Eh?"

{You were staring,} Yamashiro said.

"Oh?" Ayaka blinked as her brain caught up. {Oh! I'm… after days of Wee Vee's entries and exits being heralded by John Denver, it felt weird for it to not happen.}

Yamashiro's lips twitched.

{It's okay, we can correct that,} Nakahara said. "Country road/ _kono michi_ …"

" _Zutto yukeba/ano machi ni tsuzuiteru_ …" Yamashiro took up.

" _Ki ga suru_ …" Ayaka joined in.

"Country road…"

{Do you have any plans for your shore leave, Godai- _san_?} Nakahara asked after they finished.

{ _Ano_ … I hadn't firmed up anything yet, but I was thinking of seeing Tokyo. It's been years since I was at Kokugakuin and I thought it might be good to see what's changed.}

{Great! Yamashiro, would you please show Godai- _san_ around?}

{ _Nee-sama_?!} Yamashiro was clearly taken aback by the request.

{Ah, you don't have to,} Ayaka quickly said. {I can find my way around myself. Do you even have leave tomorrow?}

{It won't be a problem. We have nothing scheduled currently. I'm sure you won't be the only one looking to go out, even if you won't need a guide.}

{Are you sure?}

{Yes.}

{As _Nee-sama_ wills,} Yamashiro said.

{Thank you, Yamashiro. Godai- _san_ , I was going to make offerings to the _kamisama_ before going for dinner. Would you like to come along?}

{Yes, I would love to! My family makes our petitions daily in the mornings and evenings, but I haven't had the chance to do them properly the past few days.}

{Is it because there's no space to put a _kamidana_ in your shipboard cabin?}

{Yes, that's correct.}

{I understand. Please excuse me and go ahead first while I keep everything away.}

The two _Fusou_ s rose to their feet, confirming Ayaka's suspicion that as with their hulls, so too were their anthropomorphic forms taller than the _Colorado_ s. She and Yamashiro retreated through the _nijiriguchi_ to the waiting room, where Nakahara rejoined them shortly afterwards and led them to the _Fusou_ s' dormitory room. An extensive yet neatly-arranged assortment of Shinto books and material marked Nakahara's side of the room. Ayaka recognised a bunch of half-made _omamori_ charms among them.

{Can I help with anything?} Ayaka asked.

{Oh, you don't need to!} Nakahara said. {I don't want to bother you.}

{It won't be.}

{Oh, very well. Yamashiro, please show Godai- _san_ the vessels for water.}

{Godai- _san_ , does your line have any specific requirements for the _kamidana_?} Nakahara said after the offerings and prayers were made and they headed to the mess for dinner.

{Not that I know of. Something like the shelf and vessels you use would be acceptable, and I can consecrate them myse-} Ayaka's head turned midstep. {You don't need to specially go and buy some for me!}

{It's not a problem,} Nakahara said, punctuating her words with a smile. {I had already been planning on adding to my set of vessels even before you arrived. I'd offer you some, but without Matterworking, I can't turn my own resource stash into anything.}

{Thank you then.}

{Oh, and Yamashiro, Godai- _san_ , please dress lightly tomorrow? It's going to be a hot day.}

{Yes, _Nee-sama_!} Yamashiro said.

{Thanks for the advice,} Ayaka said.

===[===]===

It was some ways past dinnertime before Yorktown returned to their room, wiping down her beret and footwear before putting them away. Ayaka caught a glimpse of Hammann casting a watchful eye from the door.

"Do you need help?"

{Persona 5 Original Soundtrack - Freedom and Security}

YouTube watch?v=EnaaJkDdRhg

Ayaka, who had spent much of the time since dinner unpacking and putting her half of the room in order, looked over, confused.

"Getting your electronics set up," Yorktown said.

"I don't mind," Ayaka said, vacating the seat before the issued laptop, unlocking her iPhone and handing it over. "Thanks."

Yorktown grunted as she did whatever she needed to do on the iPhone, handed it back while explaining what had been done, then sat carefully down on the chair and started configuring the laptop. "Do you plan on getting something better for yourself?"

"Nn? You mean a gaming-grade system like Alice's, with a colourful tower and keyboard?"

"Who?"

Oh. Right. "Atlanta."

"Yes, yes, Atlanta. Or Oakland."

"Nah, I was never a serious gamer."

"Hmph."

There was a stiffness to the set of Yorktown's shoulders, even off-duty as she now was, that Ayaka couldn't remember observing with Saratoga. Neither did it read like the rule-obsessed tenseness that was Washington.

That wasn't all that didn't match, either. While Jane's had gotten a great many things right - the lilac-locked bundle of nerves that was Spence, for one - she knew very well that the publication could and did get things horribly wrong, her very self being a case in point. That said, it was still jarring to have predicted every last visible physical detail correctly and yet get the personality wrong; where was the cheerful, confident carrier Yorktown was supposed to have been?

"I would, however, like to install a high shelf in this room over here."

Yorktown looked away from the laptop at where Ayaka was indicating. "Shouldn't be a problem." A while later, she got up, saying, "Done."

"Thank you."

"Stand by for secure transmission of the relevant codes. No writing them down."

"Yes."

After that was done, Ayaka settled down to begin use, but she hadn't been long before Yorktown asked from where she had been seated on her bed, "What is it like?"

"Sorry?"

"What's it like being a Natural Born?"

That was an interesting question. "You haven't asked anyone else before me?"

"I wouldn't know if there are any in this unit who secretly are, because I can't afford to get too close to any of you. Hammann is the sole exception, not because I want to, but because she gives me no choice." A distant look passed over Yorktown's face at this. "I need to remain detached and objective. I never know when I might have to put someone in harm's way for the good of the mission, and as the amalgam leader, any hesitation could be costly. It is ironic that the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness our people hold so dear can only be maintained because of an institution built on regimentation." After a pause, she added, "I don't particularly bother to know either; so long as it doesn't compromise performance, I don't care whether someone's been sleeping amongst the masses for a long time, only came back after a petition backed by resources and blood, or pulled herself through the Veil unbidden."

That was surprisingly cynical for a Sierra Mike, Ayaka thought. "I know I am Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai, born August 27th 1996 to Nijimi Shirokaze, _kamisama_ rest her soul, and Yoshimichi Godai. I have one younger sister and one surviving grandmother.

"At the same time, though, I know I am the USS _Iowa_ , BB-61, nameship of the last completed battleships of the United States Navy, launched from the New York Naval Shipyard 27th August 1942, sponsored by Mrs Ilo Wallace, commissioned February 22nd 1943 with CAPT John McCrea as CO. I was supposed to have five younger sisters, but only three were ever completed. There were decommissionings and recommissionings and changes of command, until the last one on October 26th 1990 that put me under for the last time; I was born again six years later, having for almost 27 years had no reason whatsoever to believe I was anything but another human."

"What happens when the Navy finishes reactivating your hull, then?"

"I have no idea," Ayaka said. "There definitely is some supernal thread connecting the present me to the past me, if you call it that, but what that means in future, I don't know.

"What is it like to be a Natural Born… that's a difficult question. It doesn't seem like much has changed."

"Any new urges or instincts, compared to when you were a frail?" Ayaka thought she saw an odd look pass over Yorktown's face, but it passed so quickly that she wasn't sure it had actually been there.

"Not really. I don't find my vocabulary and habits shifting towards the nautical; it's still more instinctive to say 'wounded' and 'killed' than 'damaged' or 'sunk'. I don't have any problems controlling my rigging, for it feels just as much a part of me as any of the limbs I was born with. I don't feel any additional fear of getting submerged, though I don't think I'll ever learn to appreciate Navy coffee, and I don't feel the urge to call SecNav my lord and saviour."

Yorktown failed to repress a snort.

"If it's memory you're asking about, what I remember from my first life is hazy and just as spotty as my memory of this current life is, to say nothing of the roughly six-year long dreamless sleep in between. There are highlights, some clearer than others, but without those recording procedures that run while my rigging is active, there's no unbroken total awareness. I couldn't tell you where each and every one of my crew was at a certain point in time." A dark thought surfaced in Ayaka's mind and her face fell. "All Other Me… I really remember of April 19th is death and fire and pain. I'm not so secretly glad no one's tried asking me about that day, because I can't even tell anyone for certain what happened."

Yorktown made an affirmatory grunt. "It's similar over here, then. Regret. That's what sticks with me even when I can't retrieve a clear picture of what transpired. Regret, regret, regret. Just a persistent feeling haunting me. I still haven't dared apologise to Sara about Lex, and no matter how many times I read the countless stories I still wish I'd been around to see Little E become a legend."

"Similar… no, but not alike," Ayaka said. "That's another thing that separates Natural Borns from Summons. You speak of what happened last time as still you; I have difficulty thinking of both my past and my present as parts of the same whole."

"Oh? I believe you'd know what to do when your own sisters come back."

"Perhaps…" Ayaka wasn't entirely convinced. "Your question leaves me wondering, though: What are we?"

"Sorry?" Yorktown was quizzical.

"There have been thoughts percolating in the back of my mind. According to the lore on the _tsukumogami_ , a tool that exists for a hundred years will either be occupied by a spirit or manifest one naturally, which is why some people throw out old objects before they can hit that milestone. Almost none of us museum ships are old enough to qualify, though, and by that logic _Constitution_ should have been back a long time before any of us."

"Or _Mikasa_ , or _Texas_ , instead of waiting for the abyssals to strike first, you mean?"

"Yes. Furthermore, spirits are supposed to be intangible and invisible. They aren't supposed to manifest with material bodies." Ayaka ran a hand through her sidelocks. Even after bleeding for the nation, there was still part of herself that couldn't accept she was really one of those weird phenomena that Morrie used to follow religiously. "If we're the result of possession, then there should only be Natural Borns, no Summoned. Even if I concede that the traditional beliefs are wrong, how do we come into the picture then? Nonliving things shouldn't have sentience, a soul and memory, something to… transmit postmortem continuity of existence... yet here we are. Are we… what were the terms Iteration used? Did the presence and actions of hundreds to thousands of men in and on us create a resonance, that deeds below created an imprint above, birthed a… noetic gestalt?"

Yorktown didn't respond, seemingly lost in thought, and after a while Ayaka returned to her use of the laptop.

"Intriguing." There was the rustle of fabric as Yorktown rose to her feet. "I don't bother much with these philosophical lines of thought. I prefer answers to more concrete questions, like why you bothered."

"Eh? Why I bothered with what?" Fighting back a sudden nervousness, Ayaka turned to see Yorktown staring down at her, displeasure evident in furrowed brows.

It was finally starting to sink in that the older shipgirl was by no means short; somehow, she had always had the impression that Yorktown was petite, but in truth there had been less than 10% difference in their old bodies' lengths, and though the length differences were not one-to-one between hull and human, that still made for a giant beanstalk.

"Saving William Porter. Why did you bother?"

"It was the right thing to do," Ayaka said automatically.

"Was it really the right thing to do?" Yorktown pressed on, undeterred. "Or was it what was right in your own eyes?"

"I-"

"When you first saw her in a danger of her own making, were you blinded by your common history?"

"Blinded?"

"Paralysed? Dumbstruck?"

"No… Other Me, she was quite insistent that I leave well alone."

"Why, then?"

This time, Ayaka was indeed dumbstruck.

Yorktown stared at her for a bit longer, the anger melting into disappointment and inability to understand, then went to a safe, pulled out a laptop. "I don't need an answer right now. I just need you to think about it. I doubt you truly understand just what you're doing." She turned it on and eventually opened a video. "How many chances do you give a screwup? Seven? 70 times 7?"

"I…"

"Don't hurry to answer that for the sake of giving me an answer. Watch this first. If thrice is enemy action, and even Mary who was the most bleeding-hearted of us agreed with the choice of footage, you should be able to draw your own conclusions."

Without further comment, Yorktown went over to her wardrobe, took out some clothes, and headed for the showers; Ayaka took it as her cue to start watching the video.

It made for sobering viewing.

Willie Stepped into view of the recording shipgirl suddenly, crashing into another destroyer with an tortured crunch and keen of metal on metal, and with a panicked cry the crashee Stepped herself, right into the path of oncoming torpedoes.

Cut.

There was a slowly-intensifying drone of planes overhead as the recorder and another shipgirl struggled to lash up the horribly familiar sight of a downed Willie.

"Double up. Bandits have broken through." There was an alien tenseness to what Ayaka took a moment to recognise as Essex's voice over the radio.

"We're trying, we're trying!" The other shipgirl shouted into her radio even as she worked. "The knots keep slipping!"

"Grab and Step," a voice suddenly said, gurgling.

"Who-who said that?" Both shipgirls had immediately dropped the rope and started scanning their surroundings.

There was a coughing out of water. "I-I did." It was now recognisable as Willie's. "Grab and Step."

"You nuts?" The other shipgirls returned to trying to rig her for towing. "We don't get you lashed up right, you'd get left behind!"

"Girl, not just ship."

"Dafuq you saying?"

"Girl, not just-" Willie spasmed mid-sentence and flopped in a manner which might have been funny in a compilation of ragdoll physics fails but just looked agonising in reality, and Ayaka winced even as the knots came loose again. The sole small mercy was that she had fallen unconscious somewhere along the way.

"Damn it!"

It wasn't very long at all before the recording shipgirl's vision began lighting up in the telltale way that indicated radar contacts, even as the plane sounds grew steadily louder. "Here come those bandits!"

"SecNav damn it!"

Ayaka could almost hear Maryland's disapproving cluck even as the shipgirls' guns began spitting steel skyward, only to soon start making alarming clanking sounds.

"Multiple weapon jams!"

Barely a few beats later, the recorder's vision began to fuzz and glitch. "Something's wrong with my radar and FCS!" By the tracers, her shots were visibly going all over the place, and even with VT fuses there was still a lot of room to miss.

The other active shipgirl began fidgeting in a way that made her look less like a 80-something thousand-plus tonne war machine and more like a scared teen. "SecNav fucking damn it!"

"No choice, we gotta retrograde!" Even through the glitches, the abyssal bombers were still visibly starting their attack runs.

"Worthless isn't secure!"

"Forget the ropes! Retrograde, retrograde! If she was wrong about it then it's too bad!"

The audio playback filled with the whistling of falling bombs.

"Ah fuck, fine!" The other shipgirl hurriedly bent to grab Willie and Step away, even as explosions started to consume her form, leaving behind a shrill scream Dopplering out.

The recording shipgirl Stepped too, not soon enough for her - and, by extension, Ayaka - to avoid catching sight of a flying limb.

Cut.

Princeton clutched her gut, the hand she was using not big enough to properly cover the jagged wound leaking blood and oil to stain her shredded leotard. "Shell to the internals' not quite the same as a bomb, but still an experience worthy of South Campus!" Her voice as conveyed over the radio crackled and seemed to distort and the rictus her face was twisted into, showing far too many teeth, looked positively feral. "Nearly got my mags, but no cigar. If that's your gunners' best, then you gotta pole, Porty!"

The compilation of greatest hits - in more ways than one - went on inexorably.

The good shepherd, so Ayaka had read in the Christians' book, might leave behind 99 sheep to look for one lost one, but what if that sheep not only was a repeat offender, but kept bringing down the wolves on the rest of the flock?

Yorktown, post-shower, found her some time later still staring at the finished video with its player frozen on the final frame, her own affairs forgotten. "Done?"

Ayaka nodded mutely.

"I know this isn't easy to hear, but if we weren't in such dire straits, Sextuple-Utah would have been drummed out a long time ago for sheer incompetence. As it is, no one wants to take her off our hands, not for want of CAPT Zelben and RDML Abel trying. As for you… 'Make decisions in the best interest of the navy and the nation, without regard to personal consequences', that's what our core values say. You have the latter; do you have the former? I don't need heroes, and I especially don't need sunken heroes."

Ayaka didn't respond.

Yorktown looked to the roof of the room, a conflicted look flashing on her face. "Little E would have made a better master and commander than me. She would know what to do."

There was that phrase again.

"Little E? You mean Enterprise?"

"Yes." Yorktown did something on her phone, then showed it to Ayaka. There was a beautiful painting of her and two other blondes with similar features, outfits and rigging; Ayaka had no difficulty recognising the three _Yorktown_ s from Jane's. "One of the Iteration Seattle boys made this for my launch day." For a moment, Ayaka thought she saw Yorktown's face gain a dreamy expression. The carrier muttered something; Ayaka could only pick up "good meal". Then the doorbell chimed and Yorktown's expression cleared as she opened it to reveal Hammann, also dressed for a night out on the town. The carrier didn't leave immediately, but stopped short of the threshold and turned back to Ayaka first. "Think about it. I'll be out late. Go ahead and lock the door when you're heading to bed; I have my own keys. Good night."

===[===]===

Later, Ayaka padded out of her room. After dark, Yokosuka was rather quiet, and the strains of a koto-based cover of Toto's Africa running faintly on the base PA only added to the tranquility. As she made her way out to the waterfront, she ran the timezones in her head. Uileag would probably be having breakfast or getting ready for the day over in Port Hueneme.

There was nobody else in sight when she arrived, which meant she had the sights of the Uraga Channel and Tokyo Bay at night all to herself. That suited her just fine. Sadly, as pretty as the vibrant surroundings were, all the light meant she could barely see the stars, if at all, and she was reminded of how much she had taken the view for granted back in Imamura.

As she put a wall to her back, she looked down at her phone with Uileag's contact displayed. Without a schedule for their Japan-based operations, it hadn't been possible to set up an agreed time to sit down and use Skype or something, and in all frankness video calls were something she had never really gotten used to.

She pressed the call button.

Uileag picked up on the third ring. "Ayachi!"

"Uiui! Is this a bad time?"

"Nay, it's fine! I've had my breakfast and was getting ready to head to class. Hector already left. You?"

Ayaka checked the time. "Not… 0-dark hundred... yet. I'm good. How've things been?"

"Just starting on the new stuff we couldn't get to before the attack. Almost all the old stuff's done. Nothing I can't handle. You?"

"Oh, we reached Yokosuka last night."

"Aye, got your message."

"Yup. We met the admiral and got the FNG tour."

"Anything interesting happen during the actual convoy?"

Ayaka stared off into the dark for a few moments, unsure how to answer. "The abyssals hit us in the Bering Sea as anticipated. A few of us took hits, including me while rescuing a downed destroyer."

"You-" There was a susurration, like Uileag was hissing through his teeth while trying to fight down the urge to shout. "You what?!" he eventually said.

Ayaka winced. This was exactly what she had feared. "I'm fine! Really!" She couldn't help a twinge of guilt at downplaying her injuries.

"Ayaka! You-I-I…"

"We're okay! There's not a scar to be seen after getting repairs done!" Unconsciously, she felt her back nevertheless.

"You can't make light of this kind of thing! This is no laughing matter!"

{Of course it's dangerous, but it's not like staying on land means I'm safe!} Ayaka shouted, unconsciously switching in her anger to Japanese. {We're at war, and this is a duty I can't shirk, any more than you! This isn't a game you can load and retry until everyone gets out unscratched, and I'm not some easily-broken porcelain statue!}

{I know that!} Uileag said sharply right back, falling back into Irish in his wrath. {You-you think I don't know that? It's not the same when it's someone I know and love! I can't just accept it rationally! There's a difference between the ordinary dangers of combat and purposely putting yourself in danger for someone else's sake!}

{So? I can't run away from the responsibilities that come with who I am!}

{Responsibilities? Please! Jumping on grenades, deliberately exposing yourself to fire to pull others to safety - all of that is going beyond! Medals are not given for what's trite!}

{Maybe so, but can I really say I've done all I can if I don't? I'm a battleship! Protect, attack, never stand back - that's what I do!}

"Ayaka…" Uileag took a deep breath, trying to get a grip, abruptly aware of his slip and forcing himself to return to English. "I'm no line officer, but I do know battleships were never meant to operate alone and scorts are supposed to protect you, not the other way around! Are those warship instincts getting to you? You're a person too. Don't forget that. Is this some Spider-Man thing? What makes you think you need to take the weight of the world on your shoulders?"

{What do you think? You set an example that stuck fast in my psyche and wouldn't let go! You're in no position to criticise, Hero of Hueneme!} Still lost in anger, Ayaka hadn't followed the change of language.

"Hero?" Uileag scoffed. "No. I didn't think! I never do! You're better than this, better than I am! Tell me, Ayaka Shirokaze - this recklessness, would losing you have been worth it?"

{No! It's not about worth it or not worth it! Not about feeling like a hero! Had to be me! It always did!} There was desperation in Ayaka's voice now. {10 years back, with you, Morrie and Hitomi incapacitated, it was all up to me.}

" _Yes!" Ayaka took the marker in one hand, Uileag's hand in the other and began to write her name._

 _The next moment, there was nothing in her hands, nothing before her but a gradually-darkening mountaintop._

 _She could hear Morrie behind her as she ran, futilely yelling at the festivalgoers to flee._

 _{Again, residents of the following areas, please evacuate to Imamura High Sch-}_

 _Hitomi's frightened shriek pierced the night air._

{It was the same here. No one else was going to do anything! No one else cared for a Worthless destroyer! Hammann and Yorktown all but said so! No, it had to be me. Had to be… had to...}

She trailed off, the hand holding the phone beginning to tremble as she slid down the wall into a heap. Uileag struggled to come up with a response, and silence set in, thick and cloying.

"I had a nightmare a few days back," Uileag eventually said as she was standing back up.

Ayaka had not been expecting that, and it punched a hole in the wall of anger that the silence had begun to wear down. "Huh?"

"What you said, it reminded me. I was reading one of my textbooks and as I turned the pages, it became the book of Imamura's dead, the one that shouldn't be any longer."

Ayaka's breath hitched in her throat, the reminder like a big bucket of ice washing away the remainder of her anger. She could see in her mind's eye, clear as if Uileag was still back there, the big book with its black covers, plainly, matter-of-factly, mercilessly laying out 500-odd victims transformed and reduced to words on a list, flipping implacably past Morrie and Hitomi until it finally, terribly reached-

 _Ayaka Raquel Tresha Godai Ayaka Shirokaze - 17_

"I'm sorry for yelling at you. I know there's no excuse. I'm just-I'm afraid of anything happening to you," Uileag continued, almost whispering now. "Again. No, not again-not-you know what I mean! I'm not a role model. My helping people thing isn't something to be emulated. I'm afraid that you go off and every piece of you disappears without a parting word, never to be seen again, just like all those years ago."

"I-I know," Ayaka eventually managed to get out and back to English, "and I wish there was some way I could better assure you that I'll be fine."

Uileag sighed. "I-that's about as much as I can hope for, I fear. It's-it's probably selfish to think this, but yes, I know it'd definitely help my peace of mind if you didn't have to go and fight. Having to leave you to carry this burden yourself, it bothers me greatly, makes me feel so useless. I just wish I could do more."

"You could ask Iteration?"

"For some reason, I have my doubts about whatever they might suggest. I don't think so… Still ever wish you were just a normal person, rather than having the misfortune of being a reincarnated warship spirit with all those pesky instincts?"

"Yes… I never asked for this either. All this power, all this responsibility… It'd be a lot easier if I wasn't even able to do any of this. I've never been good with anything demanding responsibility, have I?"

"No." Uileag chuckled. "You're getting old."

"What!"

"Younger you wouldn't have been so self-aware. For all your wanting to run away, though, it always worked out in the end, didn't it?"

"Ugh. Don't you quote Churchill at me." She made a face though he couldn't see it, but there was no real wrath in her words.

{You're still an _aho_ though,} Uileag finished in Japanese.

{It can't be helped… _Amadán_ ,} Ayaka shot back in Irish.

They shared a laugh.

"So, anything else on the agenda you can tell me?"

"There isn't a detailed operational schedule, so I can't work out a fixed Skype time. We'll play by ear?"

"Sure, sure."

"Shore leave tomorrow. I'm headed to Tokyo with Yamashiro. Is there anything you want me to pick up for you or your family while I'm here?"

"Not really. I'll leave it to you."

"Yes. Have you seen the wedding preparation things Gran and your father sent?"

"Aye."

Gran and Mr Greer had sent her a whole bunch of stuff to prepare for the wedding, including but far from limited to a reminder to get fitting done for the _uchikake_. The things were hard enough to acquire for normal-sized people; where she was concerned, it was impossible to get off the shelf.

Some of the last few preparations could only be done in person, but it was really not possible to put into words how grateful she was that they were shouldering the majority of the burden.

"If only I could actually reach all the way out," Ayaka said, even as she stretched her free hand eastwards. "My hands would be happy just touching yours." She locked her mind on her grandmother's teachings and tried to follow the invisible thread extending from herself to Uileag.

{Hotline Miami 2 Original Soundtrack - Decade Dance}

YouTube watch?v=agCiXI8kZjE

Her only warning was a pleasant metallic shiver, too gentle to be said to slam into her, but undeniably intrusive nevertheless.

Feed

It was like something… someone? Was speaking at the back of her head.

Feed

No, not speaking. That implied a conscious, articulate vocalisation.

Feed

It was something mechanical and yet more primal, more instinctual, more atavistic.

Feed

For all that, its meaning was too clear.

A lurid image of herself and Uileag flashed through her mind, calling for a rather different sort of connection than what she had had in mind. It made her horribly cognisant of what she was supposed to be feeding on and what that process entailed. Her cheeks flushed even as she seemed to start seeing purple, feel the pleasant tingling return but in a place she really didn't want to think about, and still something more.

A Ship does not live on fuel alone

There was a feeling that was smooth like honey, no roaring beast, but no less insistent for her not to settle for such a meagre prize as a held hand.

Why have you not fed

Where she ended and the consuming need began was starting to blur along with her vision, the intruder trying to determine alternate sources of nourishment with Uileag thousands of kilometres away behind an ocean, and she slumped against the wall behind her, finding standing upright difficult. It took all she had to grit her teeth against the intrusion, force herself to breath evenly and regularly. The outstretched arm fell to her side, hand clenching hard enough it seemed to feel and sound like metal scraping against metal rather than nails into flesh, as she pulled a _norito_ from memory, grateful for having long internalised the prayers. She wasn't sure she would have succeeded if she had had to manually look them up, struggling against herself like this. Straining, she silently bit out the words in an attempt to quash the interruption.

Across the Pacific Ocean, unaware of her turmoil, Uileag mirrored the gesture. "Me too."

Ayaka took a relieved breath as her head cleared and the sensations faded, seemingly suppressed by the prayer, and let it out slowly and quietly. It had felt like minutes, but by both her internal chronometer and sense of Time it had been but a very few seconds, and she was grateful he hadn't seemed to notice anything. She made a mental note to make amends for failing to purify herself prior to beseeching the _kamisama_ , then retried the spell, this time without interference, only to meet with disappointment. "Sadly, the Or Energy costs are beyond me."

Uileag chuckled. "Sadly. It'd probably look odd too even without witnesses, your hand popping out of thin air. Anyway-"

"You need to go. Yes, I shan't hold you. _Mo Anam Cara._ "

"See you. _Suki da_."


	18. Chapter 17

Authors' Notes: Still trying to figure out how to avoid canon's (or BelBat's, for that matter) mood whiplash between downtime and riding the gun. Probably failing. Send help

===[===]===

CHAPTER 17

===[===]===

{The Place Promised in our Early Days Original Soundtrack - Station}

YouTube watch?v=h9w7E9L4x6M

The sky was nearly cloudless and a bright light blue the next morning. Dressed lightly for the Japanese summer, Ayaka waited for Yamashiro after breakfast. The pleasant atmosphere and general high spirits following the convoy's arrival made it almost possible to forget one was on a mission of war rather than a vacation on government expense.

There was a part of her that had wondered if it was aimless if not outright irresponsible to be relaxing in town when the rest of the world was still suffering the predations of the abyssals. Curiously, it had been an impression from Other Her that had intervened, reminded her that even during the darkest days of the Pacific Theatre, rotating out for shore leave had remained necessary lest enlisted and officers alike go crazy from the unrelenting pressure of either facing or awaiting combat.

Another reminder of what she was fighting for probably wouldn't hurt, either.

{Yamashiro- _san_ , please take care of me today,} Ayaka said once the other shipgirl arrived.

{Haaa… yes,} Yamashiro replied. She struggled with her phone. {Here's our itinerary.}

Ayaka looked. It was more of a quick introductory or refresher course, like one might go on if she only had a day to spare for Tokyo. Unfortunate but expected; a full year of study here and there had still been so many nooks and crannies to explore that eluded the average tourist. A single day could never hope to be exhaustive. Something tickled at the back of her mind about it, but she nodded in acknowledgement nevertheless.

Yamashiro took a moment to worriedly double-check the money in her wallet first. When Ayaka had been at Kokugakuin back in 2019, even with the government initiatives in the lead up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Japan had still been a mainly cash society. If the other battleship took such a precaution, whether taught by her older sister or learnt the hard way, things probably hadn't changed much in the years since. The Abyssal War almost certainly had made for a higher-priority matter than the topic of consumer payment methods. The waving of charge cards that would work in the States wouldn't here outside major chains and businesses.

There were always gawkers watching the entrances to Fleet Activities Yokosuka for shipgirl movements from out of MP range, making varying degrees of effort to remain inconspicuous. All the more so this summer morning, for sailors were wont to talk, and the passing of a day had given the newly-arrived merchant mariners enough time to aid in the cultivation of the grapevine.

There was just one problem: They had been talking about Americans, and that conjured certain impressions.

No one paid any real attention to what was obviously just a pair of Japanese young ladies, sisters or cousins from the looks of it, going out somewhere. Without the distinctive pagoda mast ornament and red and white modified _miko_ outfit, Yamashiro really looked like nothing more than just another young Japanese woman. As both the curious incident of the O'Bannon in the nighttime and West Virginia's inexplicable confusion yesterday had proven, Ayaka's ambiguous look was highly contextual, and if she was a giant beanstalk, well, nutrition was pretty good these days, wasn't it?

So it was that the voyeurs gave the two no second looks as they left the base compound, headed down Yokosuka's streets.

After they reached the Yokosuka Highway, Ayaka noticed they were headed left rather than right. {Aren't we going to Yokosuka Station?} she asked.

{JR is slower, even if it's cheaper,} Yamashiro replied. {We're going to Yokosuka-chuo Station instead.}

That they were both native-fluent in Japanese only helped reinforce the totally correct impression of "we're just a pair of locals, don't mind us".

Frankly, Ayaka preferred it this way; age hadn't made her any more desirous of attention. She knew there were those in the amalgam who didn't share that sentiment, though, and she could only imagine what the Quincy Delusion might want to do.

" _O~hi~o, Japan!" The towering blonde yelled at MAXIMUM VOLUME, making not the slightest attempt to hide her accent, as she sashayed out of Fleet Activities Yokosuka's gates, arms raised, stars sparkling in her eyes. As if under a hypnotic spell, the gawkers' cameras rose and began snapping away frantically (or some say desperately). "Me_ ga _Iowa, yo!" She gave the double V as she bent over. Her glorious American upperworks were barely restrained that they might be better witnessed, jiggling furiously with FREEDOM, and she gave everyone an eyeful. "Wah-tah-she-tah-chee_ no _koh-toh_ mo _yo-roh-shee-cool! C'mon, step right up!" She swang her stern over, making sure all and sundry could admire the superiority of real American steel. "Boy, look at that body!"_

Brrr. Ayaka felt filthy just thinking about it.

That said, there was something about Yamashiro's tone that suggested it wasn't merely time concerns that drove her choice. Ayaka made a note to look into the matter later.

They made it to Yokosuka-chuo without incident. After Ayaka checked to make sure there was still enough money loaded in her Pasmo card - hooray for no expiry date on the things - they headed for the Keikyu _Kaitoku_ Limited Express northward bound for Shinagawa Station, where they would change to move within Tokyo.

She took the time to look around the platform while waiting in line for the train to arrive. She didn't really remember how it had used to be; she would be surprised if she had entirely never came down here at all during her year at Kokugakuin, what with being practically next door to Tokyo, but she couldn't recall many details offhand. It wasn't terribly crowded, but that had been the plan behind choosing to reach the station only near the end of the morning peak periods, rather than trying to fight the crowd.

They'd win, for what it was worth - even Yamashiro's paltry 75,000 shp was orders of magnitude that of any baseline - but it wasn't polite to be bulldozers. Probably horribly bloody too. If it was still 75,000 shp at all; she hadn't heard anything from Alice about Wash getting those boiler upgrades yet, but that didn't say anything about whether JEXRA or any of the other nations' R&E divisions went for smaller modular upgrades instead of doing major overhauls like Iteration did.

It probably spoke volumes about how weird her life was now that enough power to flip a train or pull it was paltry.

The red and white, green-signed carriages pulled into the station on time and they boarded.

The train seats were two on each side of the aisle. The seat was too cramped for Ayaka, but then it always was no matter where she went, and she had long gotten resigned to it. She tried nevertheless to sit back as far as possible, draw her legs back. The harried-looking salaryman typing away in the seat on the other side of the aisle looked up from his laptop, took a momentary sidelong glance, then promptly returned to his work.

Some time in, there was a newfound weight on Ayaka's shoulder. She carefully moved her head to see that it was Yamashiro, who had dozed off. In Kagami's absence, she had to fight the urge to take the opportunity and pat the cousin she'd never had on the head. The younger _Fusou_ , who had followed custom and refrained from unnecessary talk on board the train, looked a lot better when sleeping, her features not contorted in a sullen or worried scowl.

It was probably a good idea to follow suit, Ayaka thought. Initial fascination with the not so new surroundings had passed. Now the sights along the Keikyu Main Line were starting to blur together in her mind even with being able to understand the announcements and read the signs interspersed among the buildings along the way. She would be honestly surprised if most of her comrades had lasted this long; she had seen some move off earlier, but they'd been long gone by the time the two had reached the station, if they had even taken Keikyu instead of JR at all. The ride was the better part of an hour on a good day and she wasn't getting any younger.

27.

A couple more months to actually being 27 in this life (still an odd thought), but same difference.

Her 25th had come and gone without much fanfare. Her grandmother and father had been kind enough to never say anything aloud - the whole Christmas Cake thing was dying out even in Japan, and Yoshimichi had been an outsider after all, but Ichiyo was Imamura born and bred, and the centuries of isolation had reinforced (or some say ossified) the old ways - but the steady trickle of friends both ex-Imamuran and Noo Yorka getting hitched had subconsciously put pressure on her with every wedding she had attended or even heard of, reminded her that the clock was ticking. Hitomi and Morrie's had been the hardest-hitting, close as she was to the two of them. Oh, she'd been over the moon for her best friends, but it had also made the on-waking feelings that she'd lost something come more frequently and be more intense and longer-lasting.

A moot point now that she'd finally found Uileag again, but still…

Did Sierra Mikes care about these things? Ayaka wondered. Yes, Alice had said Saratoga had been overheard mumbling dreamily to herself about someone, but that didn't necessarily come from having a crush. Or were they like West Virginia accused, a man in every port for commitment-free fornication and no thought as to wedlock? Her talk with Yorktown last night had shed no light on the matter. There was also the worrying matter of that purple that had threatened to overtake her the previous night, drawing out her secret, salacious desires-

Ayaka caught herself, forced herself to focus, and let out a sigh of relief after observing that there was no unwarranted purple in her vision, that whatever it was couldn't be summoned just by thinking of it or Uileag. Had her making her own petition instead of letting another do so made the difference, or was it the dip in the baths she had done before breakfast? Nevertheless, there was a proper time (and maybe place) for that sort of nonsense!

Now that she was no longer in a fog bank of anger, she could also properly appreciate Uileag's worry about ship instincts consuming her.

Were the things related?

How did anyone deal with all this?

It was on that sombre note that she succumbed to sleep.

The two woke up shortly before the train hit Shinagawa, and they changed to the JR Tokaido Line for Tokyo Station.

Tokyo was a roiling mass of impeccably-ordered humanity not too different from how it had been the last time she had been here, years ago. She found some humour in the fact that the metropolis was roughly a 700th the land area of her namesake yet had four times the population.

Ayaka's next thought was that it didn't really feel like a city at war, one that had bled during the Week of Blood. Sure, the large screens everywhere periodically changed from whatever they were advertising to PSAs about being prepared for the next attack, there were barricades and cranes marking out reconstruction sites even from afar, and the cuts to nonessential travel had put a damper on tourist arrivals both international and domestic, but that didn't seem to dampen any spirits. She couldn't feel any pervasive, underlying current of anxiety.

Or was it just more of that hiding of feelings that she had never been any good at?

Her third thought as she looked around was a strange feeling of something being off. Her first experience of Tokyo had been getting off a train direct from Narita Airport, not looking bewildered as she hesitantly got off the _shinkansen_ from somewhere further west, so why did it feel like it should have been the latter?

Trying to put the thought away, she tasked a lookout fairy as she took a detour to buy a Tokyo 1-Day Ticket, casting a longing glance at Gransta's many confectioners as she did so. She had seen people cosplaying as shipgirls before, a sight that had only become more surreal after her Reawakening. The idea of being an object of admiration… or worse... was still an alien one and she was morbidly curious as to whether she'd catch anyone trying to be her. She still remembered vividly that one time Gonzalez had managed to catch her when their liberty timings aligned and they had gone to a shopping mall.

" _Oh my God," Saratoga whispered._

 _Ayaka stared, bewildered, at the some sort of Saratiny in front of them. The little girl, probably no older than middle school-going, was at best up to the real deal's waist, flouncing about with a floppy flight deck mounted on a staff. Natural pink hair peeked out from beneath a brown wig made and applied with more enthusiasm than ability, also evidenced in the saccharine sayings and magical girl-inspired gestures the original - how the cosplayer hadn't realised the real deal was right in front of her, mufti or no, Ayaka could only guess - would never be caught with but Quincy was busy imitating. The dress was a decent enoug_ _h facsimile at least._

" _Aww, isn't that just precious!" Albacore said, all but cooing. "Can I take her back to the base with me, Mom?"_

 _Saratoga was still dumbstruck._

" _No, Albie, you shouldn't OSP her!" Alice said in a not-a-shout._

" _Come on, Lanty! I even brought my Fulton!" Albacore produced what looked like the recovery device from somewhere._

" _Even if that actually works, no," Alice said with a grimace, having instantly recognised the copy of Venom Snake's second favourite tool._

" _Albacore, knock it off," Washington said bluntly._

" _Fine, no fun allowed." Albacore sighed and stowed the Fulton away._

 _O'Bannon had merely glowered silently through the proceedings._

Ayaka really, really hoped nobody would try to cosplay the Quincy Delusion.

Yamashiro suddenly sighed as they were heading for the Marunouchi exits on the west side of the station.

{Eh?}

{I was too ambitious,} Yamashiro said, looking at without seeing the storefronts around. {I forgot it's impossible to get a reservation for the Imperial Palace tour at short notice. Such misfortune…}

Oh, so that was what had been bothering her about the itinerary.

{It's fine, it's fine. We can just go to the… East Garden, was it?}

{Yes… but you'll have to remember to book the tour before you come back from America next time…}

With the admonishment received, Ayaka took a moment to stop at a vending machine and buy a can of strawberry cheesecake drink she'd quickly developed a love for back then, glad it was still available. She'd never managed to find it in the States and her own attempts at making some had never gotten the taste and texture right. After some hesitation, Yamashiro settled on some concoction of red bean and brown syrup and they were off.

The Imperial Palace grounds, so far as she could see, were pretty much intact, barring a few stray hits near the edges. Why that was the case remained a matter of debate. Had the abyssals not bothered targeting it? They hadn't been discriminate in their targets most of the time; civilian or military, commercial, governmental, industrial or residential, the abyssals had mercilessly hit them all. Or was there some twisted symbolism in leaving out the palace from the target lists, perhaps a taunt to the imperial household of their powerlessness as the subjects burned? Even if the emperor was no longer worshipped as a god, he still commanded respect from most quarters of Japanese society, and a popular theory was that the abyssals were sending a message.

Whatever the actual answer, the sparing of the palace grounds was definitely a boon to visitors. She didn't know yet if her scout planes got any exemption from the drone regulations, so she didn't want to chance it, leaving her restricted to a ground-level view, but that view was still plenty beautiful.

The sight of the Hyakunin-bansho guardhouse and other ruins from the original Edo Castle left her in a contemplative mood even as her feet subconsciously followed Yamashiro and her commentary. It might not have had the grandeur of most intact European castles, but she knew that if Uileag, Kas and Shin had been here, they would have talked their girlfriends' ears off regarding some nuance or another of the structures' architecture that she had neither the casual interest nor professional training to understand. As for herself, she ended up thinking of more martial matters. War had changed; long gone were the days where a hundred men would be any real defence against a determined assault, and even had the fortification been intact Renaissance-era cannon would have been more than a match. Certainly, it hadn't been proof against the Allies' aerial bombings. Changed quickly enough, indeed, that her first body (and wasn't that still a strange thought) had been obsolete at launch and left awaiting reactivation for decades after not out of any real pressing need.

Why then did the abyssals emulate the capabilities of World War II warships so closely, instead of something more recent and powerful?

Why were aliens or demons or spirits or whatever they were so easily, conveniently even, analogisable to human classifications?

Why, in turn, did only warships no younger than World War II come back? Why were there no shipgirls of the guided missile age? No recently-slain hurrying to rise up and avenge their own sinkings?

So many questions, so few answers. The search was still a mystery; she'd poked around in the various TFV internal research publications to no avail.

Yamashiro made a note aloud to find some time to visit the museums on the grounds that they presently only had time to walk past. As they were leaving the compound via the Tayasu-mon at the north end, though, she jerked as if electrocuted and halted.

{Yamashiro- _san_?} Ayaka asked, concerned, over the radio.

{No, no, no…} Yamashiro whispered while fidgeting. {I should have left via Shimizumon instead. _Nee-sama_ will be displeased…}

{Yamashiro- _san_?} Ayaka asked again.

As if something had been kicked into gear, Yamashiro abruptly began striding briskly. She made a quick right turn at the main road and started heading towards Kudanshita.

{Yamashiro- _san_ , what's wrong?} Ayaka asked a third time. There had been many a time before that she had lamented how her size sometimes made things difficult, but there were occasions like this where having a superlative stride did turn out to be a boon, and despite the other shipgirl's headstart it was easy to catch up.

{Wrong?}

There was a sudden, palpable weight to Yamashiro's steps.

{I'll tell you what's wrong,} Yamashiro said over the radio.

As Yamashiro turned to face her with but the slightest concession to the fact that she was now walking backwards, Ayaka thought she could see the air around the other shipgirl distort from heat.

{On the left from where we turned was that monument to all our sins.}

On the left of the main road from the Tayasu-mon…

Oh.

Oh no.

Yasukuni.

Yamashiro didn't gesticulate wildly or gnash her teeth and yell like West Virginia or CAPT Cecil might have, but the set of her brow, tightness of her jaw, taut muscles and motions that seemed strangely lupine, devoid of their usual hesitant gloom, spoke volumes. Ayaka noticed out of the corner of her eye people edging away or walking a bit faster. When she continued, it was almost a growl.

{Murderers whose deeds stained the name of our people, given a place of honour - and _Nee-sama_ tells me it survived Yamata, cursed be his name, where others were rightfully torn down, preserved by cowards too afraid and prideful. What got it in the end? Not a good man daring to make amends, but invading hordes killing and destroying indiscriminately who probably don't even know what they did. Even today the rubble sits there because no one is willing to properly deconsecrate the land first.}

Ayaka tried to maintain a stolid neutrality of expression, but she was secretly curious about how much of that raw vehemence was really Yamashiro talking as a former flagship who'd met a ignoble end and how much was the influence of the fire and steel hidden beneath Nakahara's demure facade. That said, she would probably have clean forgotten about the structure in question being here if Yamashiro hadn't acted out in the first place, not that she was going to actually admit it in front of the other shipgirl, who stalked off still with an inexplicably canine bearing.

From Kudanshita, they took the Toei Subway Shinjuku Line and got off at Shinjuku-Sanchome.

{We should have lunch,} Yamashiro said, her displeasure apparently having died down by now from the calmness of her tone and body language.

{What do you recommend?}

{Shinjuku… Shinjuku… There is this place _Nee-sama_ likes with great shoyu ramen.} She led the way down a winding path into an inconspicuous, simply-decorated shop. With its wood furniture, lantern-style lampshades, thickly-stroked brush-written signboards and posters painted in vintage styles, it could almost be mistaken for something from before World War II.

{Welcome!} The waiter said brightly. {What would you like?}

{Six bowls for me please.}

{Er, three bowls please,} Ayaka said.

Yamashiro looked at her funny. {Are you sure?}

{Yes.}

{It won't be enough, but suit yourself.} In a whisper that she surely must have forgotten Ayaka could hear, she added, {No one believes a faulty battleship anyway.}

Impressively, the man hadn't betrayed the slightest sign of concern that he might be dealing with a pair of incognito shipgirls. Did he get a lot of gluttons? Granted, six bowls was far short of the eating competition records and he'd probably never had to deal with how sortieing made shipgirl food requirements soar like a rocket headed for orbit, but still. Before this whole shipgirl thing, Ayaka had never understood why anyone would want to participate in competitive eating; Kagami groused a lot about how she could never seem to get enough of dessert, even to the point of being possessive, but that was very different from racing the clock to frantically shovel food down one's throat. What kind of enjoyment did one get out of that, with no time to actually taste the flavours? It wasn't like they were fighting to quell stomach-churning hunger pangs so horrible you were tearing up and a metre felt like a mile.

The food hooked her from the first sniff and didn't let go. The noodles were just the right thickness, with enough bite to not be soggy but not too chewy as to be tedious. The _chashu_ was juicy and tender and the broth was flavourful without being salty or overwhelmingly rich. The rest of the condiments complemented the taste without becoming distracting. Ayaka could see why it was recommended. Was there better? Certainly, but her tongue was too plebeian to discern the subtleties that separated a Michelin star from a merely great eatery and she had better things to do with her money than splurge on something gourmet.

Her stomach was still wanting even after finishing her third bowl, and she reluctantly added more to her order. If Yamashiro was feeling vindicated, she didn't smirk or otherwise betray it by her features.

After they finished and left the premises, walking out of the labyrinth, Ayaka came across a curious sight that made her halt in her tracks.

Café La Bohème, the sign on the restaurant said.

{Should we go for another round?} Yamashiro asked, but the little things told Ayaka it was more of an admirably well-veiled {Are you hungry again already?} of annoyance.

{I'm fine. It's just-it's like a dirty mirror,} Ayaka said.

{What is?} The _non sequitur_ caught Yamashiro off guard, and she couldn't hide her confusion.

{This.} Ayaka gestured at the restaurant and its large glass windows. {There's another Italian restaurant back home, Il Giardino delle Parole, that looks a lot like this from the outside. Too much like this, yet not enough; the one in NYC is bigger and has frontage to a busy road.}

Yamashiro stared uncomprehendingly at her for a few moments before silently pushing on.

Shinjuku Gyoen was next, another oasis of green in the bustle of Tokyo. The place had remained mostly unscathed too; had the abyssals thought razing it a waste of ordnance? Ayaka thought it a strangely apt reflection of what they were doing now, a quantum of solace in a world gone mad. They would be plunging back into the war soon enough, and she wondered how many more quiet moments she would be able to get.

There was a flash of lightning, then a peal of thunder, and then another.

{The Garden of Words Original Soundtrack - Rain of Recollection}

YouTube watch?v=sCIUhQwuDj0

{Rain is such a nuisance,} Yamashiro said reflexively as she dug into her bag and pulled out a red oil-paper umbrella.

Ayaka stared at her even as she called into being an unseen shield, not that the move stopped her from summoning her own umbrella with the flick of a wrist. {Why don't you do some Fateworking to give yourself better fortune, like it not raining? Or at least use shielding to cover yourself?}

{Ah… _Nee-sama_ says it's not wise to use magic for trivial things like this,} Yamashiro replied.

{I'm not your sister, though,} Ayaka said as she bestowed an unseen shield on Yamashiro.

The older battleship didn't say anything to that.

As the rain came tumbling down in great sheets, falling heavily enough to distort the view such that walking on was pointless even though the unseen shields kept them dry, they sought shelter in a gazebo overlooking a lake.

The way the torrential downpour played with the light really seemed to bring out and emphasise the green in their surroundings, not that Yamashiro seemed very interested. Ayaka couldn't tell what she was staring out into space at and didn't want to pry.

Sitting in here, watching the lake ripple with every one of the myriad raindrops that hit its surface, hearing the wind whistle and howl, Ayaka suddenly found pictures in her mind of Ms Yukino. She hadn't had much contact with her high school literature teacher in the years after Fafnir. The older woman had always been cagey, particularly about what exactly had driven her to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere like Imamura, and she hadn't made much effort to publicise her movements after the Cometfall and subsequent scattering of the people. The one exception was inviting the students she had taught to her wedding. Some artisan shoemaker called Atago Teruzuki, if Ayaka remembered correctly.

Ayaka inexplicably found herself with a craving for beer and chocolate and frowned. On their way in, there had been a sign at the gate saying alcohol consumption was prohibited in the park premises, so why did the mental image of her former teacher sneaking a cold one in just seem so right?

After some time, the rain lightened enough to be walkable even without shielding, the view back to normal. Sunbeams peeked through the trees, occasionally spawning small rainbows where they met the leftover drizzle.

Yamashiro didn't share the pleasant sentiment the vista suggested. {Two months too late for sakura season… such unfortunate timing,} she said. {Konohanasakuyahime no Mikoto's domain is brilliant but briefly, and then fades from the earth. So many of us, we use that as an excuse to feed beyond our need.}

"Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Was that how the saying went? Ayaka found herself wondering, prompted by Yamashiro's sudden proclamation. How many of those on the Yokosuka Memorial Wall had gone to sleep the previous night not knowing they would shuffle off the mortal coil the next day? _Kamisama_ , closer to home, she herself hadn't been expecting Fafnir to be the literal death of her, and almost certainly neither had Morrie, Hitomi or any of the rest of the lost-that-were-not-lost of Imamura.

Maybe there was actually another angle to this matter. Besides any alleged atavistic hunger for carnal matters, were Summoned/Manifested just cognisant about mortality in a primal way most humans - and by extension Natural Borns - didn't get that drove them to act as allegedly uninhibitedly as they did?

Or was she just making excuses for people who didn't want or care for them?

Yamashiro took her briskly through the outermost parts of the Gyoen before heading back to Shinjuku-Sanchome. From there, they took the Fukutoshin Line down to Meiji-jingumae before transferring to the Chiyoda Line.

She caught Ayaka taking a long off-boresight glance as they were making the transfer. {Were you looking at the way to Shibuya?}

{I-ah, yes,} Ayaka said. {If I'd known I was coming back here, I would have called ahead so I could meet my professors. It's just… near Kokugakuin's Shibuya campus, there was a nice cafe I used to frequent during my year here, Votre Nom Pâtisserie. It had some killer caneles.} She sparkled momentarily at the thought, before the next one extinguished the brightness. {I hope Mr and Mrs Nozoyami are okay. I don't know whether it's really them keeping the social media accounts alive or a bot, the things are so advanced nowadays.}

Yamashiro's face betrayed her lack of comprehension at this tech talk.

{Ah... maybe another day?}

{Maybe…}

They got off at Nogizaka.

It was rather odd, Ayaka thought, how much of Roppongi hadn't been razed by the abyssals during the Week of Blood. She had thought that, at the very least, the Mori Tower's 54 storeys would have been a priority target, considering its high-visibility glass front and the abyssals' general lack of target discrimination.

A strange feeling of _deja vu_ she couldn't explain suddenly tugged at her as she was some way out of the station, an odd look forming on her face, and she slowed to a halt, a couple of unfortunate fellows bumping into her before the rest could catch themselves and divert around her. Fortunately, she was able to snap out of the fugue before Yamashiro needed to turn back and call on her to hurry up.

Yamashiro led the way to the nearby National Art Center, and as Ayaka gazed upon the distinctive vertical wooden slats lining the museum's walls, the inexplicable feeling of familiarity resurfaced. It wasn't something that could be explained merely by her having been in this place before once or twice years ago and overpowered her confusion and wonder at the fact that there were still exhibitions being contributed despite the looming spectre of another abyssal incursion blowing the whole lot to kingdom come. She had thought the providers of the pictures would have gone running for the hills.

The strange feeling reached a peak as they were passing Salon de The ROND on the second storey and Ayaka, unable to resist any longer, walked over to the restaurant perched on the distinctive inverted cone and scanned it, only half paying attention to the menu she had picked up and the welcoming call of the waiter.

Why did she have the feeling there was something she was supposed to be seeing? Someone she knew or was supposed to know, perhaps? She thought for a moment she had seen flashes in her eyes, but on a second look, she didn't recognise any of the customers or staff.

{Is it time to go for an early dinner?} Yamashiro asked. There wasn't any hidden acid this time, probably because of how long it had been since lunch.

{I… no. Just curious. Let's go on.}

There was unfortunately only enough time to window shop, in a manner of speaking, and Ayaka made her lamentation clear. {We really need at least a day just for this kind of art appreciation, if our schedules will allow us.}

{Haaa… I am never that fortunate,} Yamashiro remarked darkly. She didn't outright scoff or snort at the thought - that would have been so blatant even an average _gosei_ couldn't miss it - but the slight curl of her lips betrayed her feelings on the matter.

Yamashiro now led the way to Roppongi Hills, and the feeling of familiarity returned as they squeezed into an elevator that took them up Mori Tower to where the enclosed observation deck that was Tokyo City View awaited. It persisted even as Ayaka was faced with the sobering sight that awaited her above. The setting sun beautifully bathed the view in orange, but her attention was drawn instead to the many scars that abyssal bombs had left on the landscape, flattening much of what had once used to be a densely-packed skyline, and the construction equipment and barriers crawling over it. The fabricator she had seen in Everett's foundry was still being debugged and didn't have the capacity to be spared for civilian use as of yet, unfortunately.

Her eyes quickly caught sight of where she remembered the Tokyo Tower had once stood, the landmark's prominence making its absence equally salient, and just years after major renovation at that. She'd seen the photos of the immediate post-Week of Blood damage, of course, but there was something about seeing the state of affairs with her own eyes that really made it hit home, reminded her that as grave as the damage had been where it was focused, the CONUS as a whole had gotten off lightly in comparison to many of the nations the abyssals had hit, or even Hawaii for that matter.

{What's the matter with you?}

Ayaka started, took a moment to realise Yamashiro had radioed.

{You've been repeatedly stopping and acting weird for a while already,} Yamashiro said bluntly, looking at her with hooded eyes. {What's wrong?}

Maybe the familiarity fugues had been more obvious to an observer than she had thought. {Ah…}

Yamashiro sighed and turned back to the shattered skyline.

{I've been having strange feelings ever since we reached Shinjuku. It's as though important things happened in the places we went to that I should have been present for, but I can't think of what it might be.}

Yamashiro regarded her again, baffled. {Is this something about Natural Borns, this intrusion of memories? Seeing past lives in the distance?}

{No? Neither the Mori Tower nor the National Art Center had even begun construction when I was decommissioned for the final time. There's no way anyone who had served on me up to then could have been here.}

{A malfunction in your Timeworking or Spiritworking, then? Seeing the future in the present unbidden?}

{I don't know. I can't begin to guess now what's going on.}

Yamashiro's jaw worked as if she was going to say something aloud, but she ultimately didn't and turned back to the windows instead. Ayaka continued slowly around the edge of Tokyo City View, taking in the view as night fell ever so slowly. She'd been struck by the beauty of the lighting from sea level two days ago, but now from up here, higher on the street, it was plain to see how much the city had been diminished by the damage; there were just too many places that now were unlit that should have been.

{This doesn't jog my memory,} Yamashiro suddenly said.

{Eh?} Ayaka turned around to see the other shipgirl staring off in the direction of the _shitamachi_ areas and walked over.

{I don't remember much about Tokyo…} She sounded even more distant than usual. {I spent most of my last life at Kure or Hashirajima and only rarely put in at Yokosuka. I barely recognise the former now; it's changed so much. If any of my crew came from Tokyo or went there on shore leave, I don't have clear memories of that and only vaguely remember what it used to look like. I had sunk during the war…}

{I know,} Ayaka said gently.

{I don't know about anyone else, but after I was finally released from my pain, I slept through everything until now.}

{Me too.}

{This is all I really know Tokyo to be like.} Yamashiro pointed downwards at the scarred landscape and its pockmarks of damage. {10 survivors out of almost 2,000… Anything they might have left behind would have probably have been lost in the noise, and because they outlived me, I don't know if the fuzzy impressions of postwar Japan I have are what they gave me when they too died or I'm merely misattributing what _Nee-sama_ told me as my own memories. From what I've read, though, it seems to have lost a lot.}

{It has.} Even before the start of the year at Kokugakuin, there had been months of planning and preparatory work. Ayaka had absorbed a lot about what Tokyo was like, things which had proven to hold water once she had actually set foot in it.

How many of those were not applicable now because the proprietors were dead or buildings simply didn't exist any longer?

{It is getting late,} Yamashiro eventually said. {Do you-do you want to pick up souvenirs before we get dinner?}

{That'll be great! _Anou_ … but do you know where I can find hedgehog merchandise?}

Yamashiro stared blankly at her. {Hedgehog? Like Sonic?}

{No, real hedgehogs.} Ayaka pointed at the hedgehog charm dangling from her bag. {I can't remember.}

{I... don't know,} Yamashiro admitted. {I think there might be a hedgehog cafe somewhere around here, but _Nee-sama_ has never bothered looking for or even talking about it.}

{Another time, then.}

{If that suits you…}

Yamashiro led the way out of the Roppongi Hills complex to a cluster of _izakaya_. Without taking a second look at any of the choices, she immediately made a beeline for one which advertised Kyoto fare. {Yoshida- _san_!} She shouted over the rowdy drinkers before the waitress out front could get a word in, with an unusual amount of warmth, below that which she reserved for Nakahara but more than Ayaka had noticed her offer anyone else.

{Just a moment, Suzu- _chan_!} An ageworn female shouted back.

{Suzu?} Ayaka asked.

{ _Nee-sama_ 's alias for me when incognito among frails,} Yamashiro replied. {I didn't sleep quiescent as she did.}

Yoshida did indeed turn out to be an older, pudgy Japanese woman. From the way the waitstaff deferred to her, she was probably the proprietor. {Harumi- _chan_ , Suzu- _chan_! You should have called to tell me you were coming!} She said in Kansai- _ben_. {I would have saved your tab-} She stopped abruptly as she finally registered Ayaka's height, hurriedly switching back to standard Japanese. {Ah! I'm sorry! I thought you were someone else!}

{Yoshida- _san_ , it's okay,} Yamashiro said quickly. {This is our cousin, ah…}

{Shirokaze, Ayaka Shirokaze.}

She wasn't surprised by the lack of a spark of recognition on the older woman's part.

{Yes, distant cousin Ayaka from Gifu Prefecture.} Yamashiro almost stumbled over the out of turn casual use of Ayaka's first name.

{My pleasure to meet you,} Ayaka said, bowing without missing a beat at the obfuscation.

{My pleasure to meet you too,} Yoshida said, returning the bow. {My, you certainly are a big girl!}

{For-thank you. I, ah, ate my vegetables when I was young.}

{I see, I see.} She turned to Yamashiro. {Harumi- _chan_ couldn't come today?}

{Haaa… _Nee-sama_ had something to do.}

{What a shame. Poor girl. Tell your boss in the SDF to go easy on her, yes?} Yoshida caught a sign from one of the staff and acknowledged it. {Your table's free now! Just wait a bit while we clear it, okay?}

As the older woman went off to get the table, Yamashiro scoffed. {Go easy… as if we are ever so fortunate.}

Yoshida came back and called to them, and they squeezed into the premises to get to a corner table, an _enka_ and accompanying band starting to play from speakers in the background. {Should I bring Harumi- _chan_ 's usual, Suzu- _chan_ , or do you want anything in particular, Ayaka- _san_?}

{We could start with your usual,} Ayaka said, deferring to Nakahara's taste.

{The usual, yes,} Yamashiro said.

{I'll leave the menu here, then, if you want anything else later.} Yoshida went to pass on the orders and came back with a pair of tall glasses containing faint golden brown liquid, the smell of which gave away that they were whisky highballs. {Has Harumi- _chan_ found a husband yet, Suzu- _chan_?}

A longsuffering look briefly passed over Yamashiro's face, even as Ayaka subconsciously fingered her engagement ring. {I'm afraid not.}

{Please tell your sister not to keep postponing,} Yoshida said chidingly. {Just because those shipgirls can work miracles doesn't mean she can or should keep putting it off. What about yourself?}

{Haaa? Me?} Yamashiro shook visibly, surprised.

{You're not much younger than she is, Suzu- _chan_.}

If only you knew, Ayaka thought.

{Ah…}

{You should bring Kiseno- _san_ to visit again soon. How long has it been since I last saw her?}

{I… don't think _Kaasan_ can spare the time away from the shrine in _Nee-sama_ 's absence.}

{Even with your uncles or brothers standing in?}

Mom had lamented the lack of siblings and how it had created problems further down the road for Ayaka after her death, hadn't she?

No, Ayaka thought. Considering how Gran had been so tight-lipped about passing down the Shirokaze secrets, if the Nakaharas were as much like them in practices as in looks, having other family around wouldn't have helped Nakahara's mother much either.

{Ah…}

{That's a pity. Please at least have her call sometime soon?}

{I'll see what I can do…}

{Good girl! You're probably not here to listen to an old woman, though, so I'll leave the two of you now. Nice to meet you, Ayaka- _san_.}

{It was my pleasure too,} Ayaka said.

After Yoshida went off to serve other customers, Yamashiro dropped the mask of neutral civility she had been trying to wear in front of her older sister's family friend and frowned, annoyed at the table. {How troublesome…}

{They do that, don't they?}

Yamashiro looked up at Ayaka. {What?}

{Express concern about us not having given them grandchildren yet, these parents and relatives.}

{Haaa… yes.} Yamashiro nodded wearily and stared into her drink glass. {It's so hard to be us. I know she's concerned about _Nee-sama_ , and I'm glad there are people who don't see her as just a faulty battleship, but ever since… ever…}

Dad and Gran hadn't said anything about Ayaka's slowness to marry and the bloodline's future, that was true. What was also true was Mom asking her to decide for herself where duty ended and desire started - if they were even mutually exclusive at all - as far as childbearing was concerned, something she was still unsure about.

Had it really been only one and a half months?

Yamashiro eventually picked the glass up, which Ayaka took as her cue to follow suit. {To…} Her eyes darted here and there as she cast about for something to say before eventually landing on Ayaka's engagement ring, as if primed by the nagging. {To a long and happy marriage with many well-behaved kids?}

Ayaka blushed, surprised. {Thank you.}

{ _Kanpai_!}

After wading through a sumptuous meal that included what felt like a bathtub's worth of tofu and udon, they got onto the Toei Oedo Line to Daimon, walked to Hamamatsucho where they took the JR Keihin-Tohoku/Negishi to Shinagawa and there finally got back onto the Keikyu Main Line back to the base.

Staring out the train's window into a night broken up less frequently than it should have been by the shining splendour and bright lights of a big city, it was easy enough without needing to see bodies in the moonlight for Ayaka to remember that she was here on a mission of war, not a vacation on government expense.

At least she hadn't spotted any cosplayers.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Here's to all who remain fellow members of the Lonely Hearts Club after passing the Christmas cake age.

Major landmarks on one-day itinerary suggested by a Japan-staying friend of ours. All descriptions of routes are as per Hyperdia on date of writing and are not intended to be a substitute for proper travel planning and up-to-date confirmation of train schedules.


	19. Chapter 18

Authors' Notes: Oh my, it's been a while. The profile hacking problem hit around the time we had been intending to upload this, unfortunately, and it's only now that we've dared come back. Archive of Our Own, SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity and Tumblr still have the most up-to-date versions.

As always, any assistance with accurate doctrine and protocol, this time including the Chinese way of doing things, is appreciated.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 18

===[===]===

A few days later

===[===]===

"Yorktown Actual, have made contact," the fairy in Yorktown's plane said.

"Yorktown Actual copies."

"Uatu One-One, Icarus One, requesting permission to prox pop," a Japanese-accented woman said over the radio shortly thereafter.

"Uatu One-One, 161401, requesting permission to prox pop," a Chinese-accented younger girl said.

"Icarus One, 161401, Uatu One-One, permission granted."

{Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies Original Soundtrack - Operation}

YouTube watch?v=38t3d2xPN9g

Uatu had earlier been ordered to report to a briefing room. There, they had found Naganami's J-DesRon Two and Fusou and Yamashiro's J-BatDiv Two also in attendance, along with a smattering of baselines. Minami had walked in shortly afterwards along with the other two units' COs, both captain-equivalent, _Tripoli_ 's CO and their staff.

"Admiral on deck!" Yorktown shouted, and all rose into attention.

"At ease. Top of the morning to you, everyone!" Minami said. "Uatu?"

"All present and accounted for, Ma'am," Yorktown replied matter of factly.

"Riptide?"

"All present and accounted for!" Naganami shouted excitedly.

"Priestess?"

"All present and accounted for," Nakahara said, full of poise and warmth as if she had never left the _chashitsu_.

Minami took a few more moments to check everyone who should have been there was present while some staff members went over the electronics, including the webcam, then had them sit. The projector switched on, showing a default black screen with "No signal".

"We'll wait for Sasebo, Ningbo and Everett to join us before we begin," Minami said.

"Ningbo, Admiral?" Naganami channeled the surprise of most of those present. "As in People's Liberation Army Navy East Sea Fleet Ningbo Fleet Headquarters?"

As if on cue, a series of beeps sounded and the screen filled with a progress bar before giving way in turn to the TFV logo, the anchor on waves of the People's Liberation Army Navy and then a lantern at the centre of an almost circular great wave. This last emblem disappeared to reveal an Chinese man in the PLAN white service uniform with the insignia of a _Hai Jun Shao Jiang_ , their rear admiral-equivalent. His short hair and stubble were grey from age and prominent old scars over his dark, intent right eye and cheek spoke of a hardscrabble upbringing. "Indeed. Hummer." There was a slight twang to his grave voice showing where decades in the navy hadn't managed to wholly conceal the fact that at least one of his parents must have been a Hong Konger.

"Excellent timing, Settler of Debts. We've had some new blood infusions; would you like to introduce yourself?"

"Of course. Rear Admiral Shao JZ, Commander, People's Liber-Chinese Navy Special Purpose Naval Infantry Force." He nodded at the audience. "My pleasure to meet you."

There was another series of beeps and Shao was shunted horizontally off to the left half of the projection. The other half manifested the TFV logo, that of the Department of the Navy and finally the NAVENSCIWARCOM Mobius strip before resolving into CAPT Zelben. "Ma'am. Sir. Ladies and gentlemen. Admiral Abel apologises for not being available."

"Not an issue, Glider," Shao said.

"Glider, good to see you," Minami said.

A third series of beeps sounded and Shao and Zelben were moved to the left once more. The remaining third of the screen showed the TFV logo, the Rising Sun as used by the JMSDF and then a red _torii_ over a gold cherry blossom set on a circular background before showing a younger-looking Japanese man also with _kaishou-ho_ insignia on his JMSDF whites. "Guess it's my turn! _Kaishou-ho_ Ryo Ishikawa, Commander, _Kanmusu_ Flotilla Six (Sasebo District), at your service!" He grinned roguishly, drawing titters and poorly-restrained appreciative swooning from an awfully large number of the shipgirls in attendance.

{How old do you think still you are, Goldmine?} Minami said in Japanese, but the cough that followed sounded suspiciously like it was trying to hide a genuine chuckle.

{Old, but I'm not that old!} Ishikawa said, enthusiasm apparently undiminished. He flashed another teeth-baring grin that prompted another wave of suppressed swooning.

{Old enough to pretend you're the same age as us, then?}

Shao mutely raised an eyebrow, though his lips might have trembled, while Zelben defaulted to the stolid neutrality of a junior witnessing a superior's stupidity who had been conditioned by years if not decades of regimentation not to say anything aloud.

The moment was broken by a faint throat-clearing from somewhere in the background of Ishikawa's feed. Whoever was responsible, he must have recognised the voice, because it caused him to pale and quickly bow apologetically. "My apologies, Hummer, gents. Please proceed."

"It's not nice to make Mamakagi keep tabs on your behaviour," Minami said, nodding apologetically at the other COs on the projection before she gestured to the lieutenant sitting at the computer. "What impression do you think it gives our juniors?"

The views of the three officers was shunted upwards, shrinking in favour of a map of Southeast Asia. "Ladies and gentlemen, our mission today is part of the next phase of our counterattack against abyssal forces operating in the Southeast Asia region. We will be conducting a raid on abyssal bases in northern Luzon. As important as their destruction is to prevent their use by land-based bombers against either the Filipino resistance or China and Japan, this is really a diversion for our true goal: The destruction of the distributed abyssal hub in the Spratly Islands." Colours highlighted the designated areas in turn as she pointed them out.

"Paracel problem", as it had turned out, was a bit of a misstatement.

Abyssal demon ship... things, combining their small sensory cross-section and agility, were able to evade most conventional munitions that lacked shipgirl guidance even if they couldn't cloak themselves optically. The same could not be said for fixed installations, and the Paracel Islands were close enough to the Chinese mainland for the People's Liberation Army Rocket Force to keep their former disputed territory suppressed. Thermobaric warheads modified for use on their _Changjian_ , _Dongfeng_ and _Hongniao_ missiles ignited and blew away the abyssal fog, clearing it for the second punch of high explosive or even more thermobaric warheads visually or GPS/BeiDou-guided against any structures. It was something they could afford to divert capacity to the necessarily liberal application of only because of Japan and, to a lesser extent, the Koreas covering their eastern flank; Russia, Canada and the US, being much more stretched, didn't have that luxury regarding the Bering, for certain values of "luxury".

The abyssals knew or cared not for human notions of geopolitics; as an American of Japanese descent, Ayaka had found a double dose of _schadenfreude_ in the abyssals razing the PLA installations on the Spratlys, and that had been before her Reawakening.

It was one thing, however, to destroy military installations staffed by soldiers who knew exactly what they were doing despite all the official claims to the contrary. It was another to slaughter civilians unprepared to resist.

The world knew now that the erection of Infrastructure was necessary to deny abyssals the ability to spawn into bodies of seawater at will, demarcate a boundary they had to manifest outside of and sail in the slow way, buying vital time for defenders to respond to incoming threats. Back in the first days, however, nobody had had the faintest inkling, and a large clump of abyssal forces had shown up in the Yellow Sea right under the nose of the defences and patrols intended to prevent the Americans from making it through the First Island Chain. They had promptly gone to work.

What was nighttime for the US was day on the other side of the Pacific, and it had been a dark day indeed. Coastal municipalities had gone to wrack and ruin under the merciless thunder of the surface combatants' guns, and aviation ranged further inland, birds of prey on the prowl. In none less than Beijing itself, peasant and Politburo, guard and general alike had been caught off guard, bled the same red from bombs and shrapnel while HQ-9 surface-to-air missiles, allegedly capable of parting the veil of American stealth, were as hard-pressed as their Western counterparts to stop them.

Ayaka could still clearly recall the allegedly leaked footage of the then-President clinging determinedly on to life despite his myriad bloody wounds long enough to give the PLA authorisation to do whatever it took to defend the people.

Half a year on and extensive use of RadAway effects later, there were still spots in mainland China's littorals that got Geiger counters clicking furiously.

"The abyssals have recognised, just as we have, the strategic importance of the Spratly Islands for extending control over the South China Sea. The destruction of their bases there will put a cramp in their operations; even if we currently lack the ability to hold it, the downtime they experience while having to rebuild the infrastructure, big I and small, still gives vital breathing room to local resistance forces and will slow their operational tempo.

"If I may be so forward, if the shipgirls had come back purely with their miniaturised conventional firepower, we would not be considering this operation."

The map flashed over the Spratlys once more as Minami's hand began rising towards her hair, though the abrupt way she froze suggested she had barely realised what she was doing in time to stop herself from fiddling with it.

"Even with the diversion action against northern Luzon, any conventional attempt to strike the Spratlys is sure to face quick reaction forces from the abyssal bases on Palawan and Borneo, with heavier response likely to follow as the abyssals retask parts of their invasion fleets against us." The map highlighted known and suspected abyssal installations in the named locales. "Any movement against the invasion force would have to be a prolonged operation that would face mutually-reinforcing abyssal elements; attempting to conventionally sneak up on the Spratlys by hugging the Vietnamese coast, even if it succeeds in destroying the targets, still leaves the problem of egress."

Invasion force. Yes. Ayaka had read the reports both as part of the officer course and on the job. By the end of the Week of Blood, the abyssals had been mostly pushed away from the shores and local waters of the various nations with shipgirls, even if they tested the defences repeatedly, but that had still left vast swathes of the world exposed. Analysts had eventually determined that the abyssals put inordinate focus on nations that had been involved in World War II. Nations with no or little involvement had had their navies and ports destroyed but were otherwise mostly left to themselves so long as they were not hosting the major belligerents' forces - as Djibouti, with bases from the Americans, Chinese and Japanese, had learnt the hard way - or transgressed a three-strikes rule of continuing to fight against the abyssals or otherwise give aid and comfort to the major belligerents.

Those nations with major involvement in World War II, even as colonies and/or conquests of the powers, were not so fortunate.

Minami turned to where the other COs were on the projection now. "Shao, I believe this is where you had something to say."

"Yes. Technically, Wen does." So signposted, he stepped aside and waved into the picture a younger man, this one with barely regulation-length dark blue hair only recently starting to grey and boyish good looks, obvious signs of tension or nervousness nowhere to be found in his blue eyes.

"Sirs, Ma'am, ladies and gentlemen. Captain Wen LY, Chief of Staff, People's Lib-Chinese Navy Special Purpose Naval Infantry Force. You will note that Admiral Minami emphasised the problems we would face had the shipgirls only come with conventional abilities."

Ayaka could swear she heard the kind of sharp grin that came with baring of teeth, and not in the friendly sense.

"We have discussed and planned with NAVENSCIWARCOM and the Fleet _Kanmusu_ Force and believe that there is a solution. Now, the plan is…"

As he went on, the grins only seemed to grow ever sharper.

===[===]===

Thus here Amalgam 55, J-DesRon Two, J-BatDiv Two and _Tripoli_ were, waiting off Okinawa to rendezvous with J-CarDiv One "Icarus" and C-CruDiv One, the unimaginatively-monikered "1614".

Eight shipgirls Stepped into view nearby, and as Ayaka looked over at them, the world changed.

{5 Centimeters per Second Original Soundtrack - Cherry Blossom Extract}

YouTube watch?v=6XGpB3iPckg

 _Pink._

 _Pink all around._

 _Pink as far as the eye could see._

 _It was an effort to focus the eye, see the trees instead of the forest, recognise the cherry blossoms in full bloom, petals drifting down from the branches high above._

 _The flowers hung over a path cutting between houses, the environs the bright and cheery of spring yet somehow simultaneously washed out._

 _Perpendicular to the path, there was a yawning chasm separating the houses, and it was more effort to recognise one was looking at a railway crossing, steel tracks for trains going two ways off into the horizon._

 _Someone approached in the distance-_

Ayaka hissed as the vision faded before she could see more. She was still no closer to figuring out why these strange things happened or how to deliberately harness and curtail them.

Akagi was clad in a white _kimono_ with red underlayer and _tasuki_ , black _muneate_ , red _hakama_ skirt, white thighhighs and brown _geta_. A flight deck apron and rigging similar to J-CarDiv Two's completed the outfit. Slightly taller than Yorktown, she really didn't look like someone who had been 40-something with teenage children before her Reawakening, perennial jokes about Asians never looking their age aside. Scuttlebutt was that the years had actually gradually sloughed off like so much dead skin post-Reawakening until she looked to be back in her twenties, which was an odd thought. The way the long-haired brunette carried herself was a different matter. Her brown eyes betrayed her true age, and her bearing…

Ayaka felt a pang in her heart, abruptly reminded of her mother, who would have been... but 10 years the woman's senior?

She was abruptly aware that the carrier was looking oddly at her, left hand with its paired silver wedding band and pink spinel on silver engagement ring tensely gripping her bow. Had she been staring?

Ayaka hastily sucked in a breath and looked away, though not before Akagi flickered and was briefly replaced by spectres, first by someone who might have been a relative in a different outfit, then by a red-eyed _kitsune_ that was mostly black and red.

The other carrier in J-CarDiv One was dressed and equipped similarly but wore black thighhighs and blue where Akagi had red. Kaga also had brown eyes and hair, but where Akagi's hung free, she wore it tied in a ponytail on her left. She was slightly shorter than Yorktown, which still left her superlative by Japanese women standards. She was scanning the surroundings intently, face a stony mask. She too flickered and was briefly replaced by spectres, first by a grey-haired figure in purple, then by another _kitsune_ , this one similarly-coloured to the original but with short white hair.

Ayaka noted the four escorting destroyers of the division, then looked to the two Chinese shipgirls further away who were busy thumbing their noses and sticking their tongues out at Kaga behind her back.

Ning Hai was a diminutive slip of a shipgirl. Officially classified as a light cruiser, she was barely bigger both as a steel hull and a human than Hammann. Ayaka couldn't figure out why she looked a bit like O'Bannon, who was a little taller than her. She had grey hair worn in a ponytail on the opposite side to her former killer, tied together by some unidentifiable ornament, and faint brown eyes. Her outfit was an odd hybrid. It had obviously started as a thigh-length, black-trimmed blue _qipao_ with a white floral pattern, but there was also a pink, black and gold _obi_ , white fur collar, the right sleeve and left cuff of a _kimono_ and the Chinese symbol for _ning_ at the front bottom right. She wore a white thighhigh on her right leg and a white kneehigh on the left with black slippers.

Ping Hai had different shades for her grey hair and brown eyes, with the hair tied on the left into a bun with the same hair ornament as her sister and a red ribbon. She wore a thigh-length, black-trimmed red _qipao_ with a gold floral pattern, white fur collar, a gold pin securing a big black ribbon to her right hip and the Chinese symbol for _ping_ at the front bottom left. The _kimono_ sleeve was on the left arm, with a white elbow-length arm warmer on the right. She wore red shoes and had a chain around her left ankle.

Like the two carriers, they too flickered and were briefly replaced in Ayaka's sight by spectres. Like the first ones that had overshadowed Akagi and Kaga, these were human-looking ones, with no animal features and still wearing some form of _qipao_ , but undeniably different nevertheless.

In the distance, Ayaka could see two Type 055 destroyers trying to catch up to their charges. They were there ostensibly to contribute to the air defence mission as the PLARF didn't have SAMs with range enough to reach the AO from the mainland, as well as to provide more bulldogs or greyhounds on short notice. Unofficially, no one would be surprised if they were really there to discourage treachery or gather some SIGINT. She would be surprised if the cryptologic technicians on board the USN's representatives were not themselves taking advantage of the opportunity.

"Yorktown- _san_ ," Akagi said, bowing in greeting, whatever distress seeing Ayaka had caused her now nowhere to be found.

"Akagi," Yorktown replied, nodding deeply. "Ning Hai."

The Chinese shipgirl hastily ceased her actions towards Kaga and returned the acknowledgement. "Yorktown."

"You must be in need of a break. Please go ahead. We'll join you once our watch is over."

"Please excuse us, then. Tripoli Actual, Icarus One, requesting permission to come on board."

"Tripoli Actual, 161401, requesting permission to come on board."

"Icarus One, 161401, permission granted."

Icarus lined up in an orderly fashion without any prompting, Kaga at the head. Without further ado, she shot up from the water on tongues of flame and jumpjetted onto the main deck, touching down with a glacial grace.

A portal appeared in front of her almost as soon as she got clear of the LZ and Princeton walked out. "Kaga, you bitch!" She shouted, but the massive grin on her face took any sting out of the words. Heedless of being more than a head shorter, her right hand came up and Kaga met it, a loud clap sounding where they clasped hands, the Japanese carrier's hitherto blank face cracking into a tiny smile.

"Princeton. How are you finding the spell I showed you?"

"Oh, beautiful! Just the right stuff for when the Temples of Cloaca need fixing up!"

They walked off, Princeton chattering away while Kaga occasionally interjected.

Akagi waited for the rest of Icarus and Ning Hai and Ping Hai to board, the Chinese cruisers staring warily the entire time, before she too Stepped onto the LHA's deck and headed off to the officer's mess.

===[===]===

There were pre-combat preparations to make. Enlisted of all ratings, both those too young to have served during the Terror and senior seadogs alike, hurried under the direction of officers. They calibrated, secured and tweaked their gear, both acting on what they had learnt against the abyssals and preparing to put what the cross-nation distributed Task Force VALKYRIE R&E divisions had come up with through the crucible to see what was gold and what was dross. Corpsmen scrambled to stations spaced out so as to minimise response time, ready for the worst.

In her current role as a shipgirl tender, _Tripoli_ no longer had tanks, LCACs or the majority of the usual amphibious assault gear, and those wouldn't be seeing any use today as things stood, but she did still carry her F-35Bs and attendant personnel, and those were running checks on checks with nervous energy. Abyssal planes might not be able to match a fifth- or even fourth-generation fighter in a contest of acceleration or climbing, but even their emulation of WW2 capabilities was more than enough to run down all but the fastest ships or ground vehicles. Their small size and LO capabilities made seeing an ambush coming nigh-impossible, while conventional stealth was but a suggestion considering how many Storm Shadows, LRASMs and other "stealthy" missiles the abyssals had managed to intercept. BVR was a crapshoot without shipgirl or hypertech assistance and no amount of dogfight practice against drones roughly the same size really captured the sheer horror of getting dogpiled by the tiny terrors. When push came to shove, the bandits weren't afraid to become birdstrike, and what an object massing more than 100 times the average waterfowl did on impact with a plane only thrice its mass was… ugly.

That was on the material side on things. In _Tripoli_ 's prayer room, Maryland was with bowed head and bent knee alongside the ship's chaplain feverishly offering up the safety of the people and the success of the mission to her God, joined by a steady trickle of the Christians on board as they finished their initial preparations and were permitted to go. Up on the main deck, the Japanese shipgirls and some others watched intently as Ayaka, Nakahara and Yamashiro beseeched the _kamisama_.

Ayaka wasn't surprised by the perfect attendance. Most Japanese sincerely practised the various traditions of seeking divine assistance, such as in the _hatsumoude_ year-start visit to a shrine to pray for the year ahead, even if they claimed to be non-religious. These events were so thoroughly baked into the Japanese cultural psyche like that. It wasn't like Christmas or Thanksgiving in the US, butchered by commercialisation as she'd heard some of her Christian friends decrying. No. No self-proclaimed American atheist would sincerely go to a confessional.

She was glad the two sisters had offered to handle the _kagura_ , moving in perfect synchronisation, the motions of their _kagura suzu_ with the five silk ribbons trailing behind gracefully evoking the imagery of Oowatatsumi no Kami swimming through the depths. A few days were hardly enough to learn Mizuryu's take on the sacred dances - and it was already incredible that the older priestess wasn't keeping the information locked away - and one didn't need to be learned in the ways to recognise that she and either one of them would have been busting different moves. She would have needed Kagami to be here too in order to do a properly-coordinated two-person _kagura_ in the Shirokaze style, but Uileag was right. There was a difference between becoming a target through no fault of your own and deliberately seeking out danger, and she didn't think she'd take it well if her younger sister turned out to be a Natural Born too. Gran had progressed her onto doing the actual blessing part herself even before her time at Kokugakuin, and that hadn't been the problem.

Ayaka couldn't deny there was worry in the air, though she was careful to keep it out of sight as she called on Shitori no Kami's blessings. There had been fuzzy results in some of the futurecasts made by Riptide and Uatu Two, which was undoubtedly part of the reason why Maryland was spilling her guts to her higher power of choice down below deck. The other main reason was the stakes they were dealing with.

If one let her guess, to the people of the Republic of the Philippines, this archipelago of over 7,000 islands was home, and it was beautiful. 100 million people used to live here.

Now it was a ghost town.

There wasn't going to be any help for the operation from that front. The small Philippine Navy was fighting valiantly, using every bit of natural advantage and knowledge of the lay of the land they had. A bevy of natural features that confounded sensors and offered hiding places. Minefields so thicc Aku would think you were overdoing it. Traps of thermite and torpedo everywhere one could be hidden. Dopings to keep fighting in the face of injury that should have laid anyone out. Men and women hastily trained by dispersed elements of Armed Forces of the Philippines Special Operations Command did everything they could with the creativity and cunning born of desperation, even things that would have been of dubious legality at best in peacetime, to stave off the invaders. The monsters had left open an escape route, but the majority had chosen to die fighting than flee to live under the charity of another.

The abyssals had responded with an equally Soviet determination that would have either awestruck or scared the pants off the belligerents of the Great Patriotic War in how they threw a stunning amount of bodies and materiel - and considering what they were, that line got awful blurry at times - at the problem.

PT imps, the lowest of the low that the abyssals had ever been witnessed deploying, still soaked small arms and retaliated with tree-felling heavy weapons, more than could be said for the grunts of the Americans in Vietnam or the Russians in Afghanistan, and things only got worse from there. They and destroyers burned and split their keels _en masse_ sweeping ahead, springing traps that their capital ships might not need to, and returned the favour with an all you can eat smorgasbord of HE that made a _foie gras_ producer look stingy. Shells and bombs flattened verdant treelines and burned lush fields with an enthusiasm aspiring to the Arc Light runs. WW2-era carrier-based bombers might only carry 2,000 lbs of bombs unlike the 70,000 of B-52s, but the encounter at Bering had shown Ayaka they had no problems rustling up the hundred needed to match a three-plane cell's payload on short notice. The barrages made the smell of smoke, rot, gunpowder and charred flesh an ever-present companion to defenders being flushed out and left with nowhere to hide, ruining any falling trees, punji traps or cave and tunnel entrances a guerrilla might cutely use to try to delay his fate. The abyssals were already _hostis humani generis_ and they evidently saw little need for environmental conservation or hearts and minds that weren't painting the earth red. Battlegroups went for enthusiastic walks along once-ivory beaches turned killzones with the implacability and firepower at least an order of magnitude that which any platoon of Skynet's robot killers could bring. They purged with extreme prejudice anything caught trying to run the naval blockade from without, making the delivery of aid nigh-impossible from any ship big enough to carry a useful cargo. At least the beasts had the mercy or arrogance not to summarily shoot airdropped goods out of the air or bomb them before they could be retrieved.

It was a testament to the sheer bloodyminded determination of the Filipinos, helped no doubt by the abyssal insistence on securing their gains, that the archipelago had not been conquered yet, but the resistance was starving learning the futility of doing so, and even if they won, the environmental damage would cast a long shadow for years if not decades to come.

Answering the pleas of the Filipino government, China, Japan and the US had done what they could to help pick at the steadily tightening noose. Despite VALKYRIE's efforts, plinking with airstrikes and missile barrages only went so far. The Philippines had the fifth-longest coastline in the world and the abyssals, with their tiny drafts, could and did build bases in places too shallow for conventional ships, meaning there was a lot of ground to cover. Worse, the archipelago was far enough that the short-legged missiles usable against the Paracels couldn't reach, reducing the density and number of the missile swarms that could be brought to bear and their ability to clear the fog. There also hadn't been for the longest time enough shipgirls to risk more than quick raids and probes, not if one wanted to not leave the homelands exposed.

Mercy or arrogance? A curious question indeed. In addition to not destroying airdropped goods, the abyssals dropped propaganda leaflets telling nations being invaded that they would be spared any further destruction if they would just turn their weapons against Japan, offering assurances that American retaliation would not be a problem. The Philippines was no exception. As if in encouragement or some twisted parody of the Sabbath, the abyssals enacted a weekly one-day unilateral ceasefire, providing a unconditional dawn-to-dawn hiatus on offensive operations heedless of what the resistance got up to during that period.

None of the invaded nations' governments were biting, but analysts were worrying if a "yet" should be appended to that sentence. Where exactly was the breaking point where they would consider the lives of their citizens higher priority than standing united as one mankind against the invaders?

Much as it would have been nice, no one was seriously expecting that the abyssals were asking for surrender because they couldn't maintain the offensive pace.

After the ceremony, the two _Fusou_ sisters augmented the blessing by giving out _omamori_.

Yamashiro stared nervously as the _omamori_ she had just attached to Willie immediately began charring. { _Nee-sama_ , I think we have a problem.}

{It's okay, Yamashiro,} Nakahara said even as she promptly stuck a few more on the _Fletcher_.

The wide-eyed stare she got said Willie wasn't very reassured.

Akagi had gone around making sure everyone was properly fed - actual fresh _obentou_ , not MREs or the Japanese equivalent - despite the bustle, Kaga in tow, pausing only for the ceremony. As Ayaka was heading back to her cabin to change out of her _shouzoku_ vestments, she slowed to a halt upon seeing who was next in line.

Ning Hai and Ping Hai, who had stayed on _Tripoli_ the whole way instead of decamping back to the Chinese ships. There was probably something there about them being ambivalent about the current Chinese administration, but Ayaka didn't think it was her place to ask.

They glared up at Kaga, who held out the containers with an unwavering flat expression. With shipgirls, looks that could kill was a very real possibility, not just a metaphor.

Ayaka thought she could hear Ennio Morricone in the distance.

The twins folded first, snatching the food out of her hands. "Don't think we owe you anything, murderer!" They stomped away promptly.

"I know," Kaga said. Her face fell minutely. {I know,} she repeated in Japanese, even as Akagi squeezed her shoulders comfortingly.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Shizuka Minami remains the property of Salbazier from SpaceBattles. Our thanks for the assistance with her characterisation.

Our thanks too to Crusader Jerome from Sufficient Velocity for the brevity code suggestions.

Chinese shipgirl unit name suggested by Sputnik of SpaceBattles.


	20. Chapter 19

Authors' Notes: Still catching up. You're advised to go to SpaceBattles or Sufficient Velocity for the most up-to-date progress.

We apologise in advance to any practitioners of Shinto for our clumsy attempt at rendering a custom _norito_. We have no first-hand training; if anyone who is learned in the ways would like to assist us with the proper styling, it would be most welcome.

As always, any assistance with accurate brevity code use, doctrine and protocol, both Chinese and NATO, is appreciated. Goodness knows we need them. No amount of technothriller reading really prepares you for writing your own.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 19

===[===]===

Yorktown regarded the tablet in her hand with creased brow in the predawn lack of light. If there was any pleasant breeze on her hull, any reminder of times when the Philippines were a tourist destination rather than a monument to murder, she was paying it no mind.

The impromptu battlegroup, such as it were, had stopped south of Taiwan. They were well beyond the roughly 100-mile radius weeks of painstaking observation from up high by Tritons and BZK-005s had determined the extent of abyssal patrols to be, with comfortable buffer room in case some abyssal got it in its CIC to break from routine. Duty officers in their respective CICs had tensely kept watch the whole way nevertheless, on the lookout for any sign of being made that would necessitate a scrambling of units.

Wen, Zelben and the JMSDF COs had unanimously agreed that, as Uatu had the most experience in long-range operations of those present today, tactical command would fall on her shoulders.

She still thought having to carry a tablet around was a hassle. It was one thing to use one on base, but bringing it into the heat of combat seemed like a good way to damage or drop it. Ruggedised or not, she doubted its ability to survive shrapnel or the shock from a naval grade proximity detonation. Maybe upgrading her optics and CIC to project an augmented reality heads-up display direct from external sensor input was the equivalent of complex surgery and not something to take lightly, but she'd seen the stuff Iteration got up to in their foundries and gesture-controllable AR glasses in civilian electronics stores; was it so hard to get the tech up to milspec?

Yorktown double-checked the unit disposition and the bevy of low-light drone feeds showing the blemished beauty of the nation ahead, what of it that wasn't obscured by abyssal fog at any rate. Night vision equipment didn't seem affected by the abyssal chimestry so long as it used only light amplification and didn't use other sensors.

Uatu One and Three, Priestess, Icarus and 1614 were stationed in a semicircle around the steel hulls. Saratoga might not have had the chance to run night carrier lessons yet, but all they needed to do now was take off, a much easier proposition in this much less congested airspace than that off Everett; the sun would be upon them by the time the first wave had to return. The first batch of Lightning IIs from _Tripoli_ had already taken off, ready to contribute as soon as the order was given.

Speaking of Icarus.

"Icarus One, Uatu One-One, status."

"Uatu One-One, Icarus One, maintaining tally. Bandit CAP remains no factor," Akagi said.

Flights of her _Shiden Kai_ IIs slid through the otherworldly shade of green that tinged the higher Reality of phase space. Unnoticed by the patrolling abyssal airplanes they were stalking, which showed no sign of being a threat yet, they stood ready to swoop down at a hint of the TFV force having been made.

Alternate and subdimensions had been subjects of science fiction long before Tsukinoe and Watase's hypotheses, and even longer still before the two had been vindicated by the first successful portal created in 1996. All of them had been small and lasted about as long as unstable elements, though, making them nearly useless, and the field had quietly slipped out of mainstream consciousness for the longest time.

The emergence of the abyssals, as well as shipgirls that demonstrated the practical capability to step sideways, had reignited interest in the field. How exactly was transdimensional travel within the material realm related to the supernal realm, which was distinct and still remained inaccessible to mortals? Lots of people were asking that question now, not least military planners who knew very well that no war was won by remaining on the defensive.

There was a smattering of Taiwanese shipgirls on patrol off to the stern of the battlegroup.

Allegiances got confusing when warships had multiple owners, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Ning Hai and Ping Hai hadn't come back as Ioshima and Yasoshima, but a number of the ships that had been loaned out to the Republic of China postwar and followed the flight to Formosa had answered the call of their last operator, specifically answering to the ROC rather than the PRC. Despite the toll the Beijing attacks had taken on the ranks of the old "renegade province" hardliners, it still remained a touchy subject.

Politics. So annoying.

Officially, they weren't taking part in the mission.

Unofficially, if their patrols just happened to put them in the right place to serve as stern security, well, Yorktown would need to check the dossiers after this operation to be sure, but the little things she'd seen meant she wasn't expecting any problems from Shao or Wen.

Off to the west of the main formation, Uatu Two and Riptide had been charging up a lunge for hours. From this distance, the glow of their dualtone auras and the electricity flowing over them couldn't be seen, nor could the shaking of the water and wind around them. Yorktown had to fight the urge to shield her eyes nevertheless, despite knowing full well that it wouldn't do anything for how the literally seismic amount of energy being harnessed was screaming at her Prime sensors.

Back in the main formation, Ping Hai looked very far away, because she was. Her hands unconsciously made dial-adjusting motions as she tuned in to the frequencies of the fallen, coaxing tales out of the unquiet dead on the beasts that had denied them a dignified death and proper burial. Whatever jamming the abyssals were doing using the fog apparently couldn't cut that off. Every so often she entered coordinates into a tablet in her hands.

There had been some concern that she would have issues with returning to the waters where she had last sunk, but there was no outward sign, and Yorktown could Tell that internally, those fears were unfounded.

The tablet also told Yorktown about the other VALKYRIE forces waiting in the wings. The JASDF, without extended range land attack options, was relegated to air-to-air and antiship operations, but PLARF transporter erector launchers and PLAAF H-6s, JH-7s and H-20s were ready and awaiting designation for their standoff land attack munitions.

Yorktown supposed she should be more concerned about all that firepower, but she hadn't been afloat to see Fritz X lay Savannah out for 8 months; she objectively appreciated the potential danger but didn't have the deeply-ingrained fear the Cold Warriors had of such things, and it was something they should have been able to put out of Mind anyway.

On the other side of the archipelago, the Zoomies had rolled out their own heavy iron. She knew she hadn't been there the one time Little H had carried B-25s, but the B1s, B-21s and B-52s either on station or approach were far mightier beasts than those of the '40s.

It sounded like a vast force, but the facilities that had once housed senior officers like Frank Fletcher painted her a more sobering picture. Andersen and Diego Garcia had been lost early on, the very same remoteness that made attack difficult also complicating the timely arrival of reinforcements. While they were being kept suppressed to prevent the abyssals using their strategic locations as bomber bases like their former owners, neither the US nor Royal Navies had enough shipgirls to spare as a permanent garrison, and that meant the bombers now had to spend a much longer time flying to and from bases either in Australia or on the US mainland to be rearmed. In the former case, they had to carefully circumvent the abyssal CAP radius. Even with the timetable drawn up to keep the munitions flying, the situation was far from optimal. China had offered the use of its inland airfrields, but it didn't have compatible munitions. What other substitute airfields did exist and were not being suppressed lacked sufficient stocks of prepositioned ordnance needed to support sustained operations, caught off guard as everyone had been. Even pushing Air Mobility Command to the limit wasn't doing it, and resupply by sea was obviously circumscribed.

Remote underway replenishment was the sort of Holy Grail logisticians dreamed of, but the number of shipgirls with enough talent in Matter and Correspondence to do so was a particularly tight bottleneck and everyone was clamouring for them. Making the jump from magic to hypertech in this field currently remained a pipe dream.

Ping Hai's emotional register stopped fluctuating, settled into an elevated but stable state moments before she said, "Uatu One-One, 161402. Go."

"Roger."

The die was ready to be cast. Yorktown focused her Mind, visualising the redistribution of her partitioning. One for the flag bridge, for overall command of present forces. One for her own bridge, to fight the ship, sub-partitioned itself for every independently-operable system. One for the air group commander to direct the flight operations. A shrunken one for the irrelevant musings of the Critic.

She enacted the partitioning procedure, feeling her CIC expand and gracefully fragment, then ran through diagnostic exercises until she was sure she was truly multithreading instead of merely toggling between the processes like the frails' mislabeled "multitasking".

With that done, it was time.

"All ships, Uatu One-One. Stand by for sitrep. Uatu One."

A cascade of confirmatory double-clicks came in response.

"Uatu Two…"

After making sure that everyone was in position, Yorktown said, "161402, execute."

"Wilco," Ping Hai said. " _Tian Yan_ , 16402, how copy?"

"16402, _Tian Yan_ , reading you five by five," the air battle manager on board the PLAAF C4ISTAR plane currently designated _Tian Yan_ replied. Its actual designation was 714441, but someone had de-1337ed the numbers somewhere along the way and the new moniker had stuck.

" _Tian Yan_ , 161402, stand by for data." Ping Hai went over the coordinates one last time, then sent them.

"161402, data received and redistributing." A series of notifications ran down the screens on board _Tian Yan_ , adjustments and corrections being made digitally and orally as necessary. "Redistribution successful. Uatu One-One, your-" The chimes of a priority transmission suddenly sounded. "Uatu One-One, please hold. Priority transmission from Quiver Actual."

Yorktown's mental partitioning prevented her from stiffening visibly. _Shao Jiang_ Shi TQ had been the highest-ranking survivor of the PLARF after the Week of Blood, leaving him as one of the key executors of the previous president's last command after the dust had settled. His paying personal attention to this operation said things.

A window popped up on her tablet, revealing the man in the pine green service uniform the PLARF shared with the Ground Force, seated ramrod-straight. The major general-equivalent was supposedly only 50-something, with still-luxuriant dark hair and bushy eyebrows, but the scar across his left cheek, bags under his eyes and lined face muddied the waters.

"Fellow soldiers of humanity, I will not waste your time," he said gravely. "These abyssals murder without warning and demand surrender with one hand while continuing to stab with the other. Do not be fooled. Remember Kokura."

The castle town at the heart of modern Kitakyushu had once played host to Miyamoto Musashi. It had escaped both atomic bombs.

Conventionals had reduced it to ash and rubble equally well.

"We remember," all said present as one, those who were able snapping to attention.

"Remember Los Angeles."

The Creative Capital of the World was in close proximity to many of the southwestern United States's military installations, wedged between Port Hueneme and San Diego with Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach practically at its doorstep. Abyssal ravagers had detoured from the forces attacking its neighbours to fall on the city, flattening sizeable swathes of downtown and Sawtelle, and a great host were now dancing with the angels.

"We remember."

"Remember Tianjin." There was a raw edge to Shi's voice this time; if Yorktown remembered his dossier correctly, it was his hometown.

Had been.

"We remember."

"They give no quarter; offer them none. Melt; everything of theirs must melt." He hissed harshly. "It is the only fate they deserve. Quiver Actual out."

The video window closed.

"Uatu One-One, your orders?" _Tian Yan_ asked.

"Uatu Two-One, Uatu One-One. Status."

"Uatu One-One, situation normal," Essex said, the hum of the earthshaking charging faintly audible in the background.

"Uatu Two-One, very good. Stand by. Mouse Flight, Uatu One-One. Cleared hot."

{Carpenter Brut - Roller Mobster}

YouTube watch?v=qFfybn_W8Ak

"Wilco, Uatu One-One. Mouse Flight engaging."

Hundreds of miles off the northeastern coast of Luzon, weapon systems officers on board the B-52s in question made final checks, then hit weapons release studs.

Bomb bay doors fell open and began disgorging Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Ranges from the rotary launchers within. Wings folded out, turbojets flared to life and the missiles dove for the deck even as their now-empty motherships turned and made best speed for RMAF Butterworth.

"Greyhounds away. Greyhounds away."

Something would have to go horribly wrong for them to make it back before the raid was broken off, but it had to be tried nevertheless.

The missile tracks on her tablet's display looked so puny, Yorktown thought, as they plodded along subsonically. Even as the Critic pondered the sight, Flag Bridge's gaze did not wander; the next phase of the strike needed to be timed accurately for maximum effect.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

" _Tian Yan_ , Uatu One-One. 327736 through 568383 to clean the air, time on target, then affirm slow greyhounds and fire at will."

"Wilco, Uatu One-One. Cleaning the air." On board _Tian Yan_ , the airborne mission systems specialists made the necessary inputs to get the launcher units into gear, foregoing a tedious series of unit-by-unit radio transmissions.

Missiles roared on columns of fire off transporter erector launchers or tumbled from bomb bays and external hardpoints before lighting off.

"Greyhounds away, greyhounds away."

The Chinese were sparing no expense. The _Hongniao_ s hurtling into the fray in this, coordinated first wave were the latest supersonic variants, the cheaper subsonics serving as follow-up. They'd never believed in stealth where missiles were concerned, choosing speed instead as the means to limit point defence response time, and with how circumscribed stealth was against abyssals, it seemed they had unwittingly chosen wisely.

Tick.

Tick.

The missile launches had been coordinated so that the supersonic _Hongniao_ s would be the spearhead, leaving enough time for the much slower JASSM-ERs to do last-minute target confirmation with the cleaned air, but not so large a gap that the abyssals could mobilise any effective response.

Tick.

Tick.

Yorktown shouldered her flight deck.

"Bird farms, Uatu One-One. Cleared hot."

She squeezed the trigger on her flight deck, firing a burst; as before, bullets exploded and transformed into planes that buzzed off into the dawn.

The Critic tersely declared its continued disconcertment by the sight of Georges and Judies in USN colours and with the roundel rather than meatball.

" _The Hell's this?" Princeton asked._

 _Yuubari opened one of the crates she had brought, revealing a load of USN standard pattern aircraft carrier drum magazines. "A gift, of course!"_

 _Yorktown reached into it and pulled out one with green markings and "_ Kawanishi _N1K3-A_ Shiden Kai _II, Model 41" stencilled on. As she stared incredulously at it, Essex took from the crate another one, this one with red markings and "_ Yokosuka _D4Y_ Suisei" _, and mutely turned it around in her hands._

" _Vestie said you were having problems getting Hellcats and Helldivers mass produced! Wildcats and Dauntlesses aren't going to cut it on the offensive."_

" _What do you critters get out of this?" Princeton asked suspiciously even as Yorktown picked up the forms Yuubari had brought and acknowledged receipt._

" _Tsk, tsk. Not everything's about interests and transactions!" The Melonless Melon said liltingly. "Some of yours would be nice, though!"_

As one, Akagi and Kaga notched arrows to their bows with the smoothness of seasoned _kyuudouka_ and let fly, the projectiles exploding into planes of their own.

"First attack squadron, launching," Akagi said. Gone was the mother as kindly caretaker; now there was but the unyielding Kiplingesque steel of the female of the species.

"I shall not give up here," Kaga said, neither voice or expression betraying anything as was typical.

"Step right up, kiddies!" Princeton shouted, as if to an audience. "It's time for the show to begin!" She drew the hand with the cane to her top hat, causing coloured smoke to waft out of it, then threw the hand out. Planes started emerging from the hat and flying off.

Tick.

Tick.

Yorktown continued tracking the flight paths on the tablet even as her CAG instance handled the input her planes provided. It was so much easier this way, the Critic thought, having direct awareness and control over her aviators. She really wanted to ask Little H how hers had dropped the ball so thoroughly at Midway.

Tick.

Tick.

The air cleansers would merge with, overtake the planes on their way in, and rise to defogging altitude…

Right.

About.

Now.

The sky shattered.

The abyssal fog parted violently before the eye-searing conflagration of thermobarics, revealing the base it had obfuscated, and the watching sensor platforms immediately began capturing everything. Like so much of abyssal make, the base designated Yorak was a twisted parody of those built and used by humans, albeit mostly made of that chitin-like material omnipresent amongst abyssals and rendered in their Gigeresque biomechanical style. Airfields, sized for toys and with alien red veinlike patterns pulsing as if to a heartbeat, but proportionately long enough to service bombers and transports. Armouries, depots, silos, stores and warehouses. Barracks, billets and housing. Bunkers. Command centres. Communications towers. Docks dry and wet. Fences, gates, guardhouses and walls. Firehouses and hospitals. Hangars. Land reclamation. Motor pools, parking lots and roads. Piers and wharves, some with abyssal units working up or returning from a mission of murder. Power plants. Radars and weapons installations both fixed and Imp-mounted. Sports fields. Even flower gardens almost entirely populated with red spider lilies. How much of this the monsters actually needed and how much was yet more blind aping of humanity remained unknown.

There was something vaguely familiar about what Yorktown saw of Yorak as her planes started their attack runs, and despite knowing now that Fletcher's judgment had come under fire for his decisions at Guadalcanal and the Eastern Solomons after her loss, she still couldn't not feel the stirrings of concern. " _Tian Yan_ , Uatu One-One. Get me Uatu Actual."

"Roger. Wait one, Uatu One-One."

There were a few tense moments, not helped by an inexplicable discomfort in Yorktown's jaw, before Zelben came on. "Uatu One-One, Uatu Actual."

"Sir, you need to get a bird's eye of Yorak."

"You heard Uatu One-One. Get me a bird's eye," Zelben said to the command bunker, and the large display at Everett changed to show the entirety of the abyssal base in question even as the JASSM-ERs and other missiles, now with unveiled "eyes", began turning still-grounded, sickly green bulbous abyssal land-based planes with undersized wings into kindling and splattering a few imps that presumably were quick reaction aircrew rushing to their rides. He promptly failed to withhold a gasp, a sentiment echoed by more than a few of the room's other occupants. "That… is that NAS Pensacola?"

Prompted, one of the staff officers found a map of the base in question and added it to the display.

"Extrapolating from the goal of the underway dredging, the resemblance is uncanny, Sir," Yorktown said.

"Duly noted. I need Mr Odd and Mr Rush on this stat," Zelben, who had apparently gotten ahold of himself, said to a yeoman who rushed off, before turning his attention back to Yorktown. "Uatu One-One, thank you for bringing this to my attention. Anything else?"

"No, Sir."

"Carry on, then. Uatu Actual out."

{Kaga- _san_ , please remember why we're here,} Akagi said in Japanese.

{I understand.} Even as Zelben was going off the air, Kaga's _Suisei_ were hurtling towards the base's fuel tanks, heedless of anti-air fire still sporadic like uncoordinated fireworks displays. They pulled out of their dives at a higher-than-usual altitude, loosing bombs at the nadir of the arc that fell with deceptive slowness, and then they made tracks. "Attacking."

That the abyssals needed resources to wage war instead of having some kind of zero-point energy reactor or other technomagical perpetual motion device inside had been evidenced by how their remains had recognisable internals, as well as the crates, oil drums and other storage containers divers had managed to pick out of the wrecks of sunken Wa-class transports. Where they got those resources, though, that was the question. The abyssal extermination expeditions had destroyed offshore oil rigs heedless of the environmental damage, with no apparent effort made to seize them to the attackers' nefarious ends, and showed no sign of building their own. Granted, there wasn't going to be much left intact when 50-cal counted as a peashooter to be employed in tens and dozens, but surely the attempt counted?

Cameras fuzzed and stuttered, staggering from the blinding flashes that followed, as if man and machine alike struggled to grasp what had just happened.

Gone.

The structures were just gone as if David Copperfield had had a go at them, rubble nowhere to be seen, giant craters the only sign of their ever being there.

"Attack complete. _Yarimashita_."

"Icarus Two, Uatu Three-One. You holding poler's recess there?!" Princeton shouted.

"Only the best for heating up _onsen_ , Uatu Three-One," Kaga replied deadpan even as she offhandedly gave a thumbs up despite the other carrier being out of visual range.

"More like purging South Campus! You yoink FOABs from the Reds or something?"

"Bull One, Uatu One-One, what luck magnums?" Yorktown asked, torn between admiration and concern at the impressive results and the byplay it had sparked. From the way the Or Energy readings shifted after the move, destroying the small-I abyssal infrastructure was affecting the big-I Infrastructure.

On board the lead B-1, the offensive systems operator scanned his systems, and what he saw caused a frown to form on his face. "Uatu One-One, Bull One. Empty, empty."

It was probably a logical extension of the conventionals' difficulty with targeting abyssals non-visually that they had low probability of intercept emissions too, leaving the Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile – Extended Range modified to work with bombers with nothing to home in on today.

Expected, but still so annoying.

"Roger, Bull One. Bull, Horse, Dragon, cleared hot."

"Wilco, Uatu One-One. Bull Flight engaging."

"Wilco. Horse Flight engaging."

"Wilco."

Three and a half carriers' load of bombers and a few dozen missiles wouldn't have been much to work with if the battlegroup hadn't caught the base with its planes on the ground, which was where the next step came in.

"Priestess One, Uatu One-One, you are cleared," Yorktown said next as the rest of the bombers began launching their missiles, the previous wave and the planes focused on taking out quick reaction units and defences in the meantime.

"Wilco, Uatu One-One," Fusou replied. Without hesitation, she pulled out a sanctified vessel of water and anointed herself with it, not flinching in the slightest as the water deluged her head, before assuming a meditative standing position and taking six deep, even breaths. After carefully sprinkling salt into the water around her, she bowed twice and clapped twice. Still holding her hands together in a pose of prayer, she loudly and clearly, evenly intoned in Japanese, {Oowatatsumi no Kami, o great possessor of the oceans and lord of Ryuuguujou, this one humbly comes before Your august personage to beseech Your divine providence. Hear this one's prayer, o master of storm and water, and render unto this one's host a measure of Your power that the _youkai_ that defile Your domain might be destroyed and bedevil no more the peoples of yonder land.} After this, she bowed once more.

Yorktown didn't quite understand the archaic, flowery and sonorous brand of formal Japanese that was used in Shinto ritual and was hard-pressed to accurately capture its nuances in English. What she did understand, however, was the sensation of building Power with every word spoken until it peaked and broke, the warmth that travelled down her keel and rapidly turned into an electric tingle spreading across her limbs and rigging. It resolved into two rails of lightning flowing over and extending beyond each of her guns.

"Uatu One-One, Priestess One. Flipsides affirm."

Yorktown didn't let the heady feeling of the Or Energy input distract her, simultaneously welcome yet alien though it was as her gunners had never had to use her dual-purpose guns in the anti-surface role the last time. She tapped at a comms tower on the map of the abyssal base as shown on her tablet, read the target coordinates and fed it into her fire control directors. Even as she did so and her turrets began moving into position, the map updated again and again with markers showing the other targets the rest of the battlegroup had selected.

This was one of the main reasons why getting shipgirls integral datalinks was a much-desired goal; it saved valuable time and reduced potential error by sending the targeting data direct and cutting out the middleman.

The slow way was so annoying.

Bearing 113, range 328,104 yards.

Yorktown thought she heard someone making orgastic lip-smacking sounds.

The Critic could empathise. If the battlewagons had had this kind of range back then, they might never have been obsoleted by her and hers, and this was but a slice of the full range it allegedly provided.

The scrolling list checking off the ships that had made their initial target selections came to a halt, and after a quick double-check that everyone who was supposed to be present and accounted for was indeed so, noting with approval that almost everyone had picked out C4ISTAR assets and those that hadn't been able to had gone after logistics infrastructure, Yorktown said, "All units, Uatu One-One. Cleared hot."

Her 5-inch cannons barked, echoed in a rolling staccato by every cannon in the battlegroup, and then were joined by thrumming as the shells emerged from the barrels into the embrace of the magnetic fields. Another set of cracks sounded as they were accelerated to several times the first stage's speed.

Her engineering department began chittering even as the first set of shells were still _en route_ , carving glowing lines into the air from the plasma forming around their passage like some kind of energy weapon. All the lighting from the battlegroup's fire made it look like a rave gone wrong, but then stealth had gone out the window the moment the first missiles had set the sky on fire. She knew both her people and the Chinese had been experimenting with railguns but had run into bottlenecks. Engineering, materials science, power requirements. Her now-antiquated boilers had but a fraction of the output needed to power a railgun, and even if they had capacitors to help, the structural stresses would have been catastrophic for ship and shell alike.

Man plans and God laughs. Yorktown vaguely recalled such a Jewish proverb. Evidently, Fusou's apparent divine patron found the things that stymied mortals equally trifling.

When the shells landed, they made purely chemically-propelled 5in shells look like hand grenades.

It was very impressive, and despite not being a surface combatant, Yorktown couldn't resist feeling very proud.

When a nearby runway literally liquefied under a off-course barrage of battleship shells with a yield measurable in Tomahawks, she was glad the mental partitioning prevented the Critic's pout from sprouting openly on her face.

If Yorktown made no outward show of the Critic's contemplation, Yamashiro exercised no such restraint; the normally dour battleship's ebullience was on full display. { _Nee-sama_ is the best, isn't she!} She slapped the roof of one of her turrets. {This bad boy can fit so much speed in it! 5 kilometres per second!}

Akagi's emotional register briefly went unreadably haywire, but the anomalous reading was so transient that it was gone by the time Yorktown double-checked.

{Do not be so flippant, Yamashiro,} Fusou said with gentle but unmistakable chiding. {Oowatatsumi no Kami's blessing is not to be taken lightly.}

Yamashiro bowed her head, chastened. {I'm sorry, _Nee-sama_.}

Yorktown thought the exchange highlighted the need for hypertech all the more. Depending on an active procedure to take the easy way out was convenient right up until the caster that made it possible was unavailable, never mind the patron allegedly responsible for the gift. Whether Fusou really was invoking the power of an EDE or that was merely how Forceworking was enacted through her focus was something to be studied at a later time, but whatever the case, the Promethean effort of making what was currently magic accessible to the Masses was an endeavour not to be dismissed.

While the Critic continued its contemplation of future matters, Yorktown's flag bridge had kept monitoring the overall battlespace and juggling the inputs alongside _Tian Yan_ even as the bridge and CAG handled the nitty gritty of laying waste to targets. Her optics picked up on one of the tablet-displayed video feeds figures, some emitting red hazes from their eyes, rushing from a building that was apparently a barracks. There wasn't any question of noncombatants or friendlies being around - the abyssal refusal to take hostages or prisoners worked wonderfully against them - so without hesitation, she designated the location and pinged the map. " _Tian Yan_ , Uatu One-One. Heads up. Designate new HVT. Locate and designate all matching items." Eye and hand darting across the map, she helped pick out some.

"Wilco."

While _Tian Yan_ 's image recognition routines got to work picking out entries for the new type of high-value target, she got the coordinates for the point she had claimed for herself, ran the projections through her fire control directors and redirected her fire.

As a heavy cruiser, the belt of a Ri-class was able to stop an ordinary 5in shell. One streaking in at more than six times the usual speed, though, was a different kettle of fish. The first salvo went wide and only shattered the ground beneath, but the follow-up shells had its measure. The shells punched through its belt with over 40 times the usual energy and kept lancing through bulkheads, hypervelocity regime meaning they left outsize craters in whatever they hit, and shockwaves continued to propagate after they finally came to a halt. Internals shredded, the beast collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. Other shells, fired while their target had still been combat ready, smashed its bridge and set off its magazines, and the subsequent detonations mangled it beyond even Phil Swift's ability to remedy.

That said, at this range, it had taken around a full minute for the shells to impact. Even at the longest recorded range of a battleship hit - wholly obsolete, hah! CAG butted in apropos of nothing - a few seconds' flight time was needed. That might have been no time for a conventional hull to react usefully, but for shipgirl and abyssal alike, it was an eternity. Abyssals had never exhibited the more fine granularity of human-scale dodging, presumably never having had the basic combatives lessons that the shipgirl officer course had retained despite the cuts to physical training, but simply steaming out of the way was more than enough to spoil a good direct hit.

As they were demonstrating now. Human dexterity combined with shockproof ship systems meant that none of the abyssals did more than stumble as the ground cratered and deformed, sometimes literally underfoot, with every miss where a frail that somehow survived the blasts and shrapnel would have been tossed around like a leaf in a storm.

No, maybe the railgun wouldn't have saved surface combatants, the Critic thought while the CAG vectored some of her planes over to deal with what a Wo had managed to launch and other units added their fire to both this target and others. They would need precision guidance for that, and she doubted Excalibur being rated for 15,000G was enough to survive acceleration to hypervelocity, if it even could be successfully miniaturised at all. Could Fusou work a seeker capability into her procedure? Something to work out with the battleship in future.

Select target.

Acquire coordinates.

Fire or vector bombers in to attack target.

Repeat until target destroyed.

Select new target.

Acquire coordinates.

Attack target.

Repeat until target destroyed.

Select target.

Acquire coordinates.

Attack target.

Repeat until target destroyed.

Boredom? Yorktown didn't know the meaning of that word. Destroyers and cruisers might live to dart in to nibble at flanks and dart out posthaste, and battleships thirsted for extended punch ups, but carriers like her had been built for the humdrum of war at a remove. If there were incoming shells to worry about, someone had screwed up.

No. Let the surface combatants worry about getting enough excitement.

Eventually, with the critical infrastructure destroyed as planned and the raiders moving on to purging the abyssal base of less vital structures, it was time for the next phase of the operation. "Uatu One-Two, Icarus Two, Uatu One-One. Futurecast."

"Wilco," Akagi and Iowa replied.

There was something Artistic, almost soothing about watching an imago being woven, the Critic thought. Most procedures, being reflexive actions or nearly so, had their imagines form and dissipate too quickly to really appreciate, but this advanced precognition she had ordered required an extended enactment that took enough time as to be spectatable. Whether it was the angular, brutal forms of the recent Summons, or the fancy flowing glyphs of the Natural Borns and the old hands, there was a strange sort of Beauty to it, seemingly harkening to a more elegant age than the enactors had been around for. There was something strangely thrilling about how this esoteric knowledge, visible only to those with supernal vision, was beyond the reach of the Unenlightened.

Bridge only noted glumly that she didn't have the ability to replicate any of what they were doing for herself yet.

The procedure-enactment halted and her tablet chimed, the map filling with appallingly wide swathes of highlighting that extended from the known abyssal fog locations.

"Uatu One-One, Icarus One. Warning red," Akagi said, a ragged note in her voice. "Gorilla is inbound, bandit home plates in the dark, no joy. Suppress unable. Backtrack requires unacceptable primal expenditure." Here the motherly tone of concern reasserted itself. "Uatu One-Two is Victor hes-"

"Icarus One, beadwindow." Yorktown sharply interrupted the other carrier.

"R-roger," Akagi replied, startled, and clammed up with an audible click of her jaw.

The Critic felt a flare of annoyance. Did Akagi not realize how close she had come to a breach on a channel with frails?

Even as Flag Bridge contemplated the message - indeterminately large formation incoming, enemy bases in a radar and visual blind zone too large for present forces to engage, temporal reconstruction of flight paths costing too much Or Energy to be practical - Yorktown's face betrayed her tactically-minded partitions' annoyance at the results, even expected as they were, while the Critic's disgruntlement evaporated into envy of the other carrier. Oh, to be so guileless because you didn't have to worry about self-depriving idiots stubbornly refusing to gain power!

One more card to play. "161402, Uatu One-One. Status."

Ping Hai lowered a hand from her technoseance, Yorktown noting with approval that the light cruiser hadn't waited to be ordered. "Unable, Uatu One-One. Bandit home plates too far to get precise coordinates." Areas on the map lit up, still too large to be useful even for the air cleansers, and Yorktown's frown resurfaced.

"Hey, that gives me an idea!" Princeton suddenly cut in as she used a finger to trace a circle around one of the fogged-up areas hiding an abyssal base. "Three-Three, how's it said?"

Uatu Three-Three developed the same cheeky grin as her element leader. " _Tian Yan,_ Uatu Three-Three. May I have some Lamp Rubs, Brother?"

 _Tian Yan_ snorted. Whether it was in annoyance or amusement, Yorktown couldn't tell from where she was. "Unable, Uatu Three-Three. General Shi might appreciate your taking his advice to heart, but you are not authorised for Lamp Rubbing on this operation."

"Shame," Princeton and Three-Three said ruefully together, then went back to razing the base.

Yorktown had to admit to herself that some Rubbing of the Lamp would have the coverage necessary to solve the problem, even if it would create more in the process.

"All units, _Tian Yan._ " When the C4ISTAR plane called in again later, it was without any mirth. "Heads up. Bandits have exited music zone. Angels 30. Inbound from vectors 137 through 193. Count… count… count… rising. IMREC unable to keep up."

Yorktown stared at the tablet where the visual feeds overlaid on the map showing the actual movements of the dark cloud of hundreds of incoming abyssal planes. Emerging from the jammer zone, their flight paths matched those projected earlier. She flipped over to the multimodal sensor picture only for a fleeting hope to be dashed that no, the abyssals hadn't suddenly become detectable to conventionals. It would have made her job so much easier. The abyssals were taking the bait just as planned, committing their forces such that they'd be out of position for the main event, so why did she feel like the other shoe was about to drop?

"That's right out of South Campus it is," Princeton said over her with an uncharacteristic hiss of anxiety. "We calling in a Case Thorsub?"

"No need. It's okay, Uatu Three-One," Akagi said, firm once more.

No. This was no time for sudden doubt regarding her instincts and judgement. Whatever had been said about Frank Fletcher after the fact, he had been triumphant at the Coral Sea, Midway and Eastern Solomons.

Yorktown shut her eyes.

Even if it had come at a cost.

Her right hand came up, hovered briefly over the tablet with index finger pointing down at it, and jabbed down and again like a hailstorm.

She opened her eyes and, with but a glance at the fruits of the basic Correspondent/Entropic procedure she had just enacted - not as many points as she'd hoped for - said into the radio, " _Tian Yan_ , Uatu One-One. Stand by for data."

"Data received and redistributing," _Tian Yan_ said, a hint of relief in his voice that, in hindsight, made the Critic wonder if the fairly young-sounding officer hadn't been old enough to see combat in the days of Terror. "Redistribution successful."

It would have to do. No one was honestly expecting this to outright wreck the other, further bases, not without the sustained bombardment Yorak had been put through, but every plane caught on the ground, every bit of infrastructure that had to be rebuilt bought more time for the resistance until TFV could come back for another go.

"Bull, Horse, Dragon, Uatu One-One. Launch all remaining greyhounds and retrograde. You won't be much more good here and we'd rather you don't get bounced by an X-ray we missed."

"Wilco, Uatu One-One. Skating."

"Wilco, Uatu One-One."

"Wilco."

Without waiting for the confirmatory calls on the bombers' launch and leave maneuvers, Yorktown began running a timer while she switched over to _Tian Yan's_ channel and said, " _Tian Yan_ , Uatu One-One. 327736 through 568383 stand by to fire for effect, time on target on designated coordinates. Very fast greyhounds, HE and thermobaric mix in effect."

"Roger, Uatu One-One," _Tian Yan_ said shortly after getting ready notices from the indicated air and surface units on the loadout change. "Shooters awaiting your command."

"All units, cover. Bird farms, affirm pure fighters, notch south southeast, stand by to intercept at 300 miles." She put word to deed by swapping her current mixed loadout magazine for a pure-fighter one while waiting for her planes to return. "Icarus One, Papa Sierra Juliet at 200."

"Wilco."

"Consors, affirm riders."

"Riders affirm," the steel hulls and other conventional units reported in shortly after switching for missiles with the hypertech beamrider mods.

"All ships, affirm Tango Three Indias."

"Tango Three Indias affirm," shipgirls reported as they switched to Type 3 (Ver Inoue/Tanaka) shells.

"Stand by to engage leakers at 100 miles out. Continue current fires until countermanded or all targets eliminated."

100 miles. The Critic grimaced. 100 miles was an almost inconceivable improvement over the 17,000-something yards with an AA ceiling of 37,200 feet the 5"/38 Mark 12 normally had, it wasn't denying that. However, this was short of even what the battlegroup had been using against the abyssal base, and the simple procedure being used to target with the map and futurecast abyssal ship movements wasn't good enough to handle the demands of surface-to-air work.

Radar was the real limiting factor. The CXAM was officially rated for up to 50 miles out against aircraft, with anecdotal claims of 100, and the Mark 4 on the Mark 37 GFCS was good for 20-something. She had witnessed the disgustingly Escheresque endeavour, more of a permanent augmentation than true conventionally-producible hypertech, that had been developing the procedure that enabled shipgirls to use both search and fire control at 100 miles. That was still nothing against the roughly 200 of AN/SPY-1 or the alleged almost 300 of the Chinese Type 346. It greatly hampered the ability of the beamrider-equipped air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles to contribute.

I want a better radar, all of Yorktown's mental partitions thought as one. Or at least the ability to hook into Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air.

"Uatu Two-One, Uatu One-One," she said into the radio. "Bandits inbound. Stand by to execute."

"Roger," Essex replied, now with an uncharacteristic note of strain from containing the tremulous charge.

Yorktown concernedly glanced momentarily in the other carrier's direction. She could have worked something out with her superior understanding of hyperstatistical projection, had in fact done so just days ago in the Bering, but busy setting up to tackle the main objective as she was, that was out of the question. Even this little that Essex was inadvertently betraying was a tip of the iceberg.

There was also the unfortunate fact that Oakland, the amalgam's air defence specialist, was also one of their close combat specialists. She hadn't thought much about it earlier, but now that it was an issue… Why couldn't they have had gotten one of the other _Atlanta_ s?

So annoying.

"Uatu Three-One, you know what to do later."

"You're right I do, Uatu One-One!" Princeton said, the usual cheer now back in her voice. It probably helped that hypervelocity impacts even with an incendiary rather than hi-ex load still produced a pyromaniac-satisfying blast.

The timer ticked over to the right point - earlier than before in order to compensate for the greater distance and complications from following the cluttered terrain - and Yorktown said, " _Tian Yan_ , Uatu One-One. Very fast greyhounds cleared hot."

"Wilco."

In the end, even if she didn't crave the thrill of a brawl the way the surface combatants did, it always kept coming down to waiting, the Critic thought as the Chinese supersonic missiles flew off to converge with those subsonics their American counterparts had deployed. They'd punched out Yorak's teeth early on so thoroughly it was like having Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson double team some wretched weekend warrior without a referee to restrain them. After a while, all they were doing was just cleanup, punching bone chips into the floorboards of a moonlike wasteland with more craters than the face of an acne-plagued seaman fresh from RTC. Hopefully they had ruined the base beyond the ability of the abyssals to salvage, not that anything could be said to be off the table where the demons were concerned.

Projection of inbound enemy plane movements and interception at 300 miles, accounting for time needed to achieve optimal position...

"Bird farms, Uatu One-One. Commit fighters," Flag Bridge ordered while shouldering the flight deck and squeezing the trigger to start launching. "Other units, target update."

"All aircraft ready," Akagi said, firing off a plane-arrow.

"It's a piece of cake. Nothing to worry about," Kaga said, following suit.

"Time for a new trick!" Princeton said as she pulled more planes out of her hat.

The formation of intercepting fighters looked so puny against the veritable locust swarm they were ascending to meet.

300.

The fighters fell from high on the abyssal formation like lightning - but men had survived lightning strikes before, and these fat land-based bombers with their olive green skins and sickly yellow-green front lights like literal demonic visages took a lot of killing even for the enhanced shells Kaga's _Shiden_ carried, and that was without escort fighters making things difficult.

200.

Akagi's fighters jumped "down" from phase space, emerging on one flank of the attackers and promptly going to work, but there were enough targets that having to cover a second front didn't seem to inconvenience the escorts much.

100.

"All units, Uatu One-One, cleared hot."

Air-to-air missiles leapt from their rails, surface-to-air missiles blasted forth from VLS cells and shells from conventional and Enlightened cannon alike sought to bring bandits literally down to earth, and without waiting for any of them to start claiming kills, Yorktown next said, "Uatu Two, Riptide, Uatu One-One. The back door is open. Repeat, the back door is open."

===[===]===


	21. Chapter 20

Authors' Notes: Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer, Amazing Spider-Man) is apparently slated to helm the live action version, which will feature a rural Native American girl and a boy from Chicago. We'll see how that works out. Still hoping for someone to do a proper crossover between KanColle and KnNW.

In the meantime, you should probably go back and carefully reread Chapters 16 and 17 before continuing.

FanFiction and AO3 readers are still strongly advised to join us at SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity or the MAEt-Rambles Tumblr for previews.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 20

===[===]===

"Roger," Essex replied, sounding uncharacteristically harsh with strain.

What Stingray and her fellow instructors had taught, closing to hit with a melee strike, was merely the basic form of the lunge rote. Most shipgirls didn't delve further into it due to preferring to stay at range. For those predisposed to CQC, though, it was a stepping stone to more advanced applications, like what Uatu Two and Riptide were doing now.

The Spratly Islands were spread out across an area of around 164,000 square miles. They had less than 490 acres of actual naturally-occurring land, but Chinese land reclamation works had added thousands more, paving over reefs in the process. The Chinese had claimed the installations on the islands were purely for defence and they were not contradicting the declaration not to militarise the South China Sea. To almost everyone else, it was a facade so thin there were less flimsy nighties.

The abyssals hadn't even bothered with the slightest pretence. It was free real estate, at least after they had shot up the whole place and proceeded to build their own bases right over the damage, taking up the reclamation to their own ends.

As _Kaishou-ho_ Minami had said, the distributed hub was a vice choking the South China Sea, the centre of a spider's web from which abyssals radiated out, denying passage to the Straits of Malacca to the southwest and Australia to the southeast while supporting the slaughter of Southeast Asians. It was a set of interlocking strongholds that made any attack by a small force a suicide mission, if it even dealt any lasting damage at all.

Unusual problems called for unusual solutions.

"We're-we're finally moving?" Takanami asked, teeth clattering in time with her body's shivers, not all attributable to the effort of containing the charge.

"Of course! Have no fear!" Charles Ausburne shouted, any tremble that might have been present lost in the heroic rippling of her grown, Amazon-like warform's musculature, the right hand drawn back.

"For we-" Naganami took up, standing ready to execute a _kendou_ thrust form, bracer-emitted energy blades alight and thrusters aglow.

"-are here!" The two of them finished in unison.

West Virginia also seemed to be twitching, but no one could tell why; it was just so subtly off from the innate frequency of the energy being charged and no word had passed her lips since the preparation had begun.

"Executing," Essex merely said, and 12 shipgirls kicked off while punching as one, blows angled slightly downwards.

{Perturbator - Retrogenesis}

YouTube watch?v=GmnCKftMbPw

Accelerating to a speed that made BrahMos-II or Zircon look languid, and doing so within a short enough timeframe as to appear to be teleporting to anyone without accelerated perception, was an endeavour that demanded great force.

The explosions of water that now followed made those that usually accompanied lunges look like firecrackers.

When the lunges ended hundreds of miles away, yet still out of the patrol radius of the Spratlys bases, gold lances of the painstakingly-charged up Or Energy shot out and stabbed into the water. The supernal fire wasted itself not on the passage, with all the energy delivered to the seabed at 12 specific locations.

To the north, every shipgirl with even the slightest Primeworking ability reeled from the earthshaking energy release even though the carefully-placed impacts meant that the resultant shockwaves were shaped to not travel their way, systems automatically failing safe to local control. Yorktown's own prowess meant she was the worst hit, her mental precautions doing no good.

There was something, she realised with sudden horror, looking at her from up high.

Eyes blazed like stars.

No, not just physically up high among the clouds, but High.

A symbol staring from the supernal, radiating meaning deep as an ocean trench.

Justice.

Vengeance.

Hatred.

Rage.

Disappointment?

Sorrow?

Then the moment passed, and whatever the vision had been, it faded like smoke from her logs and systems, leaving her with only an inexplicable horrible dread as she reasserted control, immediately leaning out of the way of a bomb that exploded short and merely bounced shrapnel harmlessly off her shielding.

It wasn't a submarine earthquake, landslide or volcanism, but Yorktown's earlier calling the magnitude of energy seismic had been no understatement.

Countless tonnes of rock erupted upwards towards the surface, shoving the water above its usual sea level in an optimised way that, like a shaped charge, the vast majority of its energy and the water it moved was directed into a cone-shaped zone occupied only by the targets.

This far from shore, there were no impediments to waste the energy of the supernally-charged speeding water, nothing that made it rise beyond a metre in height. The abyssal hub was too valuable a target for the CAPs to be pulled off to attack the intruders, and they still maintained their 100-mile radius vigil, for all the good that would do. The kind of specialised equipment used to detect wave movements wasn't usually found on warplanes, and especially not of the World War II era; as it was, they never realized anything was wrong.

There were naval pickets closer to shore, but the vaguely cetacean configuration of the abyssal destroyers meant they were in a perfect position to get hit lengthwise by the waves, which smashed right through their armour like a sledgehammer through _washi_. The abyssals with humanoid configurations didn't far much better; if they weren't short enough to get their innards pasted by the first wave that hit, it shattered their legs and caused them to fall, allowing the next to finish the job.

Thus, the first warning the abyssal bases got was when the water began to recede from the coastlines of their islands.

Before they really had time to act on the sign, the waves hit.

The water slammed into the abyssal-occupied artificial islands hard enough that chunks of coast exploded off and went flying, but it didn't stop there. It was as merciless to the abyssals on shore as it had been to those it had caught in the water. Armour was annihilated, bulkheads broke and chitin crumpled before it. Battered, buildings broke under waves like wrecking balls, offering no shelter to those that had managed to get in. Squat as the artificial islands were, there was no high ground to flee to. A few imps, whether out of stupidity or defiance, tried firing on the walls of water to no avail.

"Haha!" Charles laughed, putting her full diaphragm behind it. She sounded a bit distorted in the Or-saturated environment. "Justice-"

"-rains-" Oakland took up.

"-from above!" The two finished together. At combat separation, they were too far away to make physical contact, so they exchanged an air-fistbump.

"Uatu Two-One-Alpha, launching," Essex said, paying no heed to her subordinates' antics as she sent Bell into the air to evaluate the results of their action.

"Dumpling, how copy?"

"Reading you," Essex's reception crackled, "four by four."

Bell cast his eagle eyes out on the scene beneath, cleared of the fog by the bases' destruction.

By the time the waves had smashed apart the islands and passed through to Borneo, most of the energy had been expended, and thus there wasn't enough left to trigger the tsunami warning, what few of the warning buoys and systems were still functional or intact at any rate. Not that it would have mattered; Borneo had been occupied by the Japanese during World War II and had in turn been the subject of the largest Australian amphibious action. Thus too had the abyssals struck, turning its coasts into abattoirs. East Malaysia had always been the unfavourite of the nation even before the Terror, and thus had its Royal Malaysian Navy presence suffered, while the Indonesian Navy was perpetually overstretched even in peacetime. What of them in the locale that hadn't been caught in harbour had tried their best, but even first-rate navies had gotten a drubbing; these, with no shipgirls to answer the call, had stood no chance. There wasn't anyone or anything left to be collateral damage anymore.

That was not the sight that concerned Bell at this moment. "Dumpling, report survivors."

"Survivors?" Essex replied.

"Affirm," Bell said, looking down at a battered but still unbroken bunker that continued to stand in maddening defiance. Abyssals were staggering out of it.

"Excuse me what the fuck," Oakland said, disgust and shock warring on her face, forearms slashed diagonally downwards. She was joined by a hubbub of disbelief.

"Sur...vivors?" Essex repeated, what appeared outwardly to be mere hesitancy in her delivery a sign of what was really unbridled bewilderment for anyone else. "How? Where did we make a mistake?"

"Outrageous!" Charles shouted, raising an arm and clenching its hand into a fist. "It's definitely not fine now!"

"The hard way, then!" Bell shouted.

"Survivors?"

{Ali Edwards feat. Casey Edwards - Devil Trigger}

YouTube watch?v=YV5IheNfK54

Uatu Two and Riptide snapped their heads over to West Virginia, distracted from double-checking shields and their other assault preparations not just by her suddenly speaking up, but also at the slight odd tone in her speech.

"Survivors?" She repeated, this time with a much more noticeable distortion in her voice. At the front of the formation, pointed towards the now-smashed abyssal bases on the Spratly Islands, someone within visual range would have seen her whole body spasm visibly. Even beyond that, those who could see Primal flows could tell there was something off about hers.

"Uatu Two-Two, status," Essex said, an audible waver in her delivery.

"SURVIVAARRRGGGGHHHHH!"

West Virginia's back arched in a painful-looking manner, eyes scrunching shut even as her yell devolved into an animalistic growl. The _omamori_ on her exploded as her aura flared to life unbidden, shrouding her like smoke but also forming into a pair of shapes like moth wings above the two sides of her rigging. Her halberd fell from slackening hands and automatically drew itself back to her rigging with a loud clank. She started growing in size, swiftly surpassing Essex; her clothing, unable to keep up, tore, but the effect was savage rather than sexy. Her hair, minimally cared for even at the best of times, turned bristly and scraggly like she had been sleeping in the wild for weeks.

She straightened back up, now nine feet tall, as the growl died out and her eyes snapped open, revealing blazing lights that left visible trails with every maddened twitch of her head. The hands revealed nails transformed into claws flickering unpredictably between keratin and steel. Her face was now a rictus of rage, slavering maw opening and closing with every mechanically-regular boiler cycle. Sunlight glinted off worryingly sharp canines and incisors like they were naked metal rather than enamel.

She pawed at the water with a foot, electricity materialising on and around her like a halo, and with a flanging howl that swiftly Dopplered, she moved.

It was the loping stride of something where the rising animal met the falling machine, the rope between animal and machine over the abyss, yet was not quite of either. It was a motion somehow flowing yet rigid, primal and mechanical. Mothman meets Metal Gear.

Every baseline with the misfortune of having a visual on her, even through cameras from thousands of kilometres away, turned pale, swallowed suddenly dry throats and broke out in cold sweat as they tried to resist the abrupt activation of long-neglected visceral prey instincts.

Wrinkling his nose, CAPT Zelben mutely noted that not everyone had succeeded.

Even from a distance too great to actually have eyes on her, one could hear the boom as she tore through the sound barrier and kept accelerating, see the great rooster tail she was leaving in her wake.

More than a thousand miles away to the north, Shimakaze jerked abruptly mid-sail and frantically looked around from side to side, Rensouhou- _chan_ clicking and clattering away in concern at their mistress' actions.

{I felt a great disturbance, as if an old hag suddenly went fast,} she said to them in Japanese, still twitching with the sudden bout of nervousness. {I fear something vulgar has happened.}

Thousands of miles eastward, Quincy suddenly started dancing a strange dance that involved her moving her arms with cocked elbows out from side to side while alternating the legs she kicked out. "Gotta let it out, gotta let it out!"

"What is it this time, Quincy?" Saratoga asked even as she bobbed and weaved through a pattern of abyssal shells.

"Oh, Wee Vee got just too many successes on the prude rage roll and pulled her devil trigger!" she said excitedly as she made a finger gun and made a firing gesture at the offending Ta, whose guns locked up, before resuming her singing and strange dance. "This demon inside has a hold of me!"

"Clenching its power!" Alice joined in the dance, showing entirely too much familiarity with the moves Quincy was busting. "Trying to break free!"

"Oh my God," Saratoga said.

Back where the action was, things were not so understated.

"The Ahroun," Charles said in an awed, reverent tone. "The legend is true…"

Takanami did not share her enthusiasm. "Uatu One-One, Riptide Two! Go En-secure!"

Even as Takanami was making her call, Yorktown's alarm bells were going off. Iowa and Maryland's mental states had flared with fury shortly after West Virginia's had redlined, with Willie D showing a less critical but still obvious uptick. Why these Victor Hestia fools, and why now? Did it have to do with their lack of carnisymbiotic consumption? The Critic asked irritably, while Flag Bridge betrayed no sign of disgust or other turmoil to the outside as it took the call on the shipgirls' Enlightened encryption. "Go for Uatu One-One."

"Crinos, Crinos, Crinos!" Takanami's delivery, like her body, trembled violently.

Of all the things, what a wonderful time to have Yorktown's concerns confirmed. It had been supposed to be straightforward: Destroy the hub and islands with the tsunami, get back to the main formation, fall back to safety. Bad enough to need to lose time cleaning up manually. Worse to have this happen. "Roger. Uatu One-Two, One-Four, Two-Two, Three-Two, knock it off."

Iowa, Maryland and Willie D's anger paused in their ascent and began slowly dropping.

West Virginia showed no change.

Yorktown boosted the Power, the bliss that surged through all her systems from tapping on her vitae stores doing little for the Critic's displeasure, and tried again. "Two-Two, knock it off, knock it off, knock it off!"

Still no change.

SecNav damn it, so annoying.

"Uatu One-One, Icarus One. Five minutes," Akagi said suddenly with a surety Yorktown wasn't feeling.

"Very well, Icarus One," she said nevertheless. "Other units, Uatu One-One. Press for five minutes. Acknowledge."

The confirmatory double-clicks regarding the maintenance of their present course came with varying degrees of hesitance this time.

"Riptide, Uatu Two, cover."

"Wilco," Essex and Naganami said as their respective units shifted to long-range fire, targeting anything sea- or air-based that might try to give West Virginia trouble.

A Ho-class waddled out of the bunker among those abyssals that were returning to their positions, cannons glued to the horizon where the water had come from.

It never heard the descent of the battleship that crushed its cylindrical hull underfoot like a can.

By the time the whistle of West Virginia's pounce caught up, she had leapt onto an I-class' back. Claws flailing, she peeled open the shell and tucked into the world's grisliest sashimi with abandon.

A Ri tried to interrupt.

Claws came up underhand, tore its jaw off and slammed one end of said jaw back into an eye socket. It promptly collapsed, and without bothering to wipe off her ichor-stained mouth, she was moving to the next target even before the monster stopped twitching.

There was no art to it.

She leapt at another, jaw unhinging to expose the darkest maw with too many teeth.

CHOMP

None of the usual fine footwork and precise strikes.

She shook her head vigorously, and the abyssal's headless body flopped to the ground.

There was only the predator consumed by primal fury.

Claws plunged into the citadel of another abyssal, pulled its boilers out and enjoyed a crunchy morsel.

A whirling dervish of shells and slashes.

Studying the halberd was something she had done in this life, but the four-time gunnery champion's markmanship was seared into the depths of her being from the last, and even consumed by berserker rage the fairy crews pulled shots and aimed dots unfailingly.

Claws rent a Chi's shield in two, and without slowing from the exploding torpedo within, West Virginia sliced the wielder apart.

Crater-creating chokeslam.

Decapitation by clothesline.

Eye gouge on destroyer.

Fist through head.

Grievous harm with a body.

Grounded target getting 16in coup de grace.

Head twist off.

Literal disarmament and pummeling with own limb.

Broken in two… WITH HER BARE HANDS!

On hurtled on the pain train, West Virginia ripping and tearing without mercy, until there were no more afloat abyssals outside the bunker and the parts of island surrounding it were visibly worse for wear, but she still wasn't done. Without hesitation she charged the bunker, cannon firing and claws rending, and burst through the opening in the wall she had created.

She was immediately met with a fusillade of fire, and her much-abused shields, not having been renewed as the others had, finally failed in full, the abyssals' almost admirably desperate fire causing her to reel as they gouged chunks out of her hull.

All that firing of naval grade weaponry in a confined space eventually caused a choking critical smoke buildup, and the blindfire Artillery Spotting effect ran its course, causing the guns to stop firing to cool off even if the abyssals wanted to just keep unloading into the obscurant.

The seconds ticked by and the smoke began to clear.

The surviving lights in the bunker flickered.

A low, throaty growl issued.

Blinding brownish-purple floodlights pierced the smoke and the abyssals reflexively shadowed overloaded optics.

West Virginia exploded from the smoke and barreled into a nearby Ru. She seemed unhindered by the many holes all over her hull, a few of which would have been debilitating if not outright lethal to a normal, and as the meat and metal regenerated in real time, it became clear why. She grabbed hold of the Ru's shield-gun things and forced them apart, then pulled the black-clad abyssal towards herself and sank her teeth into its neck even as her own cannons laid down fire on the rest.

Almost immediately, the abyssal's eyes rolled into the back of its head, imps that had been struggling to fire its guns falling slack at their stations. Anyone who was near enough and could filter out the noise from the barrages West Virginia was firing would hear, however, wet, slurping sounds as the monster writhed. It was soon joined by a noise simultaneously the shriek of sundered steel and the mutilation of meat as she ripped the Ru's arms off, ichor flying, yet spraying less than there should have been, the ghoulish fountain ceasing too rapidly.

The creature stopped twitching and she tore her teeth free, casting the carcass carelessly aside before continuing the good work.

From far overhead, Bell cooed appreciatively as he watched how West Virginia's progress could be seen in the way the bunker rocked and shook, hole after hole getting punched through its walls, abyssal viscera and gore flying out, cracks growing steadily in the bit of islet beneath.

"T minus four.

"T minus three.

"T minus two.

"T minus one."

West Virginia soared out of the bunker, howling triumphantly as it crumbled to bits, the island shattering and slipping beneath the waves.

"Exactly on the dot," Akagi said approvingly, concluding her countdown. "Riptide One, Icarus One. P-charge supernova."

"P-charge supernova, aye aye," Naganami said. Covers on her missile cells flipped open and spat out missiles.

"Uatu One-One, stand by," Akagi said next.

"Ready," Yorktown replied.

By the time West Virginia noticed the incoming ordnance, it was too late.

It was nothing compared to the great endeavour that had been worked earlier, but for something that could be fired off at will and meant for a far more selective area of effect, it was enough.

A new star of gold was briefly born.

West Virginia spasmed uncontrollably from the Prime-enhanced blast, giving Yorktown her cue. "Uatu Two-Two, Uatu One-One. Knock it off."

West Virginia fell to a knee and began shrinking back to her normal size.

"Uatu Two-Two, status."

"HVT neutralised. All systems nominal," West Virginia replied after taking a deep breath, the light of sanity back in her eyes as she returned to her feet. "Correction: Except for the unbecoming state of my attire." Disgust manifested on her features and she made to wipe her mouth on a cuff of her ruined jacket. Wincing at a reproving look from Maryland she somehow managed to receive despite the hundreds of miles between them, she pulled out a handkerchief instead.

"Uatu One-One, _Tian Yan_. Bandits inbound on Uatu Two and Riptide. Bearing 105 moving on vector 200, angels 25, count... minimum 300," _Tian Yan_ said, concern in his voice.

"Roger. Uatu Three-One, Uatu One-One. Execute."

"Wilco!" Princeton shouted. "Portal going up!" With a flick of her cane, sparks flew as she traced a circle to form a portal.

The circle completed, flashed, and abruptly disappeared before the portal could form.

"What?" Confused, Princeton tried again.

Second verse, same as the first.

"The Hell?"

She tried again to no avail.

"Seriously?"

A fourth time, once more a futile effort.

"SecNav fuck!"

Utter disgust flooded all of Yorktown's mental instances at this and she couldn't help giving voice to it. "Uatu Three-One, ravioli ravioli do not lewd the Secretary of the Navy!"

Princeton recoiled from the vehemence in the rebuke.

Yorktown took a boiler cycle of silence to let the feeling seep out of her systems. "Execute."

"I'm trying! I don't know what the critters did, but my portals are fizzling!" Princeton shouted with a tooth-baring growl.

"Uatu Three-One, Riptide One," Naganami suddenly said, sounding like she was recalling something. "This is Quetzalcoatl Gatekeeping Instability, isn't it?"

"This is what?" Bewilderment tinted Princeton's frustration.

"Quetzalcoatl Gatekeeping Instability induced by Or Energy saturation? Prof Shirakawa gave a presentation on his work with dimensions… a while back."

Did he? Yorktown thought she would have remembered if eminent JEXRA personnel had come down to Yokosuka to give presentations before.

Even as the Critic tried to ponder the mystery, Flag Bridge was speaking up. "Riptide One, Uatu One-One. We don't have time to call c-c-Choukai or JEXRA Ominato and have them walk us through however they overcame it. Do you know how to resolve this issue?"

"Time…" Akagi could be heard musing as she skated easily between bombs while every retaliation from her triple-A hit their targets.

"Not really?" Naganami replied sheepishly, the sound of her VLS cells discharging faintly audible in the background.

Yorktown bit back a scowl at running into this dead end. Every extra second they were out here was another chance of someone taking a bomb.

"Icarus Two, reinforcing."

Blasting tongues of fire, Kaga backdashed to where Ning Hai and Ping Hai were, the wash of her thrusters leaving flash-boiled water in their wake. The swarm of abyssal bombers had laid down a steadily-tightening net on the two Chinese despite the battlegroup's efforts, putting out such a mass of ordnance that even Stepping was a hazard. They were fighting a losing battle against the open display of terror.

Stowing her bow, Kaga thrust her arms out and pillars of fire surged from both hands as she methodically swept them up, down and around. Bombs and torpedoes exploded prematurely, while anything flying low burned and melted before the conflagration.

"We-we didn't need your help, anyway!" The twin cruisers shouted, but the usual edge that they'd had whenever mouthing off at Kaga seemed a bit more dull now.

"You're welcome," Kaga replied.

"Uatu One-One, Uatu Two-Two. Charging another lunge back will not work under fire," West Virginia said. "As for Stepping, this Or Energy glut must be what's-disrupting-it!" She bit off the words as each Step she attempted took her only a shorter distance than what it should have.

"Time!" Akagi suddenly exclaimed in a tone of realisation. "Uatu One-One-"

"Icarus One, do what you must," Yorktown said.

"Affirmative. Uatu Three-One, Icarus One. Could you use one of your chicks to draw the portal on the other end?"

"I could, theoretically, but…"

"Yes?"

"Our doctrine of transferring squadrons around, unlike how yours keep squadrons tied to one carrier, means I don't have a strong enough sympathetic link to do that!" Princeton growled as she tried again and again in vain to form a portal despite the efforts of the raining bombs.

"Your captain is a qualified aviator."

"Yes, he-no, that won't work." Princeton's rising face fell again. "Even if I make a portal outside the dead zone, it'll still take too long, and the Judy's already the fastest plane we have."

"That's not a problem. Uatu One-Two, Icarus One."

"Eh?! Ah, Uatu One-Two reads," Iowa replied.

"I need you to get one of Princeton's _Suisei_ over to Uatu Two and Riptide."

"I haven't managed to figure out how to accelerate others!"

"That's okay. Remember, part of the crew, part of the ship."

"Part of the crew-oh! My scout plane crew, unlike carrier air wings, are considered part of ship's company, and therefore casting on them counts as casting on self!"

"Yes, exactly. Go."

Iowa Stepped over to Princeton and deposited an aviator fairy next to a _Suisei_ that the other shipgirl's captain had already boarded. The fairy clambered in, sealed the cockpit and Princeton picked the plane up, dropped it into her hat and brought her cane up again.

"Portal going up!"

This time, the portal formed, even though Uatu Two and Riptide were nowhere in sight through it, only empty sea and the sound of wind and waves greeting her.

"Do your thing, my lovely assistant!"

Iowa let out a confused "eh?" in response but carried out her threadwork anyway, and shortly after the _Suisei_ with its special aircrew rose from Princeton's hat, it briefly glowed green before rapidly accelerating and, with the crack of a sonic boom, passed through the portal.

"Uatu Three-One, Uatu Two-One-Alpha. Visual on your chick," Bell said shortly afterwards.

"Wasn't fair for us to have all the fun, huh?" Charles shouted, not unkindly, between the units' stumpy Stepping as the _Suisei_ got close enough.

"Let's try this again!" Princeton shouted as she moved her cane in sync with the airplane drawing a circle in the air in the vertical plane. "Portal going up!"

This time, the portal successfully opened. Takanami Stepped through with indecent haste, but the rest of the shipgirls didn't have to be asked a second time to start moving.

Essex was the last one through, bringing down abyssal planes with her deadly dance of fire all the while, and as soon as she was through Yorktown shouted, "All units, retrograde!"

===[===]===

Night had fallen.

Lying in her bunk staring at the overhead of the compartment hadn't been conducive to Ayaka's slumber. The bunk was tight at the best of times, with its configuration giving no way to sit on the edge, and the room was also wanting for sitting space.

Her insomnia could be blamed neither on the astronomic gastronomy that was the post-combat resupply binge, nor on the repair baths with their relaxing rejuvenative effects that inevitably led one to partake of what the Bard had called life's great second feast. The faint snoring cum boiler noises of her roommates attested to that.

Nay. More cerebral matters were to blame.

Ayaka finally decided to stop trying to force herself to sleep, left the bunk and got dressed. With that done, she left the room and started walking _Tripoli_ 's passageways.

The abyssal bombers had broken off pursuit near Taiwan's territorial waters. Who knew why; maybe whatever passed for a commanding intelligence among them had decided that with the Philippines still stubbornly clinging on to existence, the time wasn't now to take the fight to Taiwan in earnest. However the case, the few bombers that had stayed the course soon found themselves prey instead of predators.

With no more hostiles in the area, the battlegroup had stood down from general quarters, the shipgirls returning to _Tripoli_ by their watches to resupply and repair.

Ayaka really could see now why Akagi was such a figure of admiration for the Japanese shipgirls. The calm, certain way she had dissected the problem…

Only served to amplify the reminders of her mother and how she had freely dispensed the wisest advice to Imamura's people.

This only gave Ayaka plenty to be melancholy about. She knew perfectly well Akagi couldn't possibly be Nijimi Shirokaze reincarnated; the ages were all wrong, even discounting that they had spoken that momentous day.

It did nothing for the feelings of inexplicable familiarity the other Natural Born evoked in her. She couldn't figure out why this was the case; she'd never heard of the older woman just a month ago and their previous lives hadn't crossed paths. Hadn't she worked through these issues a long time ago? Evidently not.

Troubling.

More troubling, though, was the fury that had filled her following West Virginia's frenzying. A fog had descended on her, blinding her sight in a curtain of red, calling on her to do her duty to DESTROY ALL ENEMIES, FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC, OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES!

Ayaka shivered.

Bad enough that Yorktown's rebuke had focused on Princeton using the Secretary of the Navy's name in vain rather than this, as if it was an expected and accepted occupational hazard. Worse was the red haze's suspicious similarity to the purple that had threatened to consume her that first night at Yokosuka.

She was going to have to talk with Vestal about this first thing upon returning to Everett. She didn't trust the secure base-to-base communications for something this sensitive.

Belatedly, she realised that mired in her thoughts, she had somehow ended up in front of a lounge.

Yorktown had talked up the virtues of partitioning the mind to properly run multiple processes simultaneously and maintain constant awareness, but she'd always found the idea of deliberately fragmenting herself profoundly disturbing, even if it was supposedly beneficial.

She peeked into the lounge, felt the stirrings of fear.

It wasn't that the sole occupant hadn't bothered turning the lights up properly; shipgirl enhanced sensory acuity meant poor lighting wasn't much of an issue even without using any knowing or unveiling effects.

No, it was who that occupant was.

William D Porter.

The _Fletcher_ was seated in a red four-segment sofa at the other side of the lounge with its back to the outer bulkhead. There was a drink glass before her on the coffee table in front. She was looking down at the floor, and looked so small on that seat meant for grown men.

Ayaka withdrew from the doorway behind the bulkhead. "Will I get hurt if I go in?" She divined silently.

No, the answer came promptly.

Pushing aside her worry, Ayaka went in.

She didn't try peering into Willie's thoughts, but whatever they were, they must have been engrossing enough that her entry hadn't been noticed until she was a good way inside the lounge; the fearful, surprised gulp was plainly audible as she headed to the drink bar first.

As Ayaka was walking, she could see the charred _omamori_ that the destroyer had inexpertly reattached to her clothing.

After picking up a drink, Ayaka headed to the same sofa and took a seat, careful to leave one segment between the two of them. "Good work out there today."

"I didn't do anything," Willie replied bluntly. "Ping Hai gave coordinates. Ms Nakahara gave range. Uatu Two and Riptide accomplished the mission. Ms Shi-Shino-something-Akagi gave wisdom and you and Princeton extracted them. Yorktown and _Tian Yan_ tied it all together. I did nothing."

She was technically correct. She had indeed done nothing; Ayaka hadn't had the chance to properly study the _omamori_ that had been issued, but it seemed that they had burnt for her, taking on the burden of her so-called curse and preventing it from affecting anyone else. This time, at least.

There was that odd vibe again. Ayaka couldn't explain it.

"Why did you bother?"

The _non sequitur_ caused Ayaka to start, though fortunately not to choke on her drink. "Eh?"

"The time before this. Why didn't you just leave me? What if Hammann, Mary or Wee Vee weren't there? For years I've been a millstone around the neck of those around me, a coward without the courage to stop being a burden or a waste of air. The abyssals would have finally set me free. Why?"

Ayaka put the drink down, drew her left leg to herself. Despite Hitomi's efforts, she'd never been the most decorous of sitters even before Uileag had entered her life, and the seat hadn't been meant for giant beanstalks anyway. A thousand platitudes flashed through her mind, along with a morbidly muted sense of horror, before Yorktown's words from a few days back resurfaced.

" _Was it really the right thing to do? Or was it what was right in your own eyes?"_

She realised she knew the answer.

"Once upon a time, there was a girl."

Ayaka took a deep breath.

"Her mother died of an illness when she was young and her grief-stricken father was chased away by her grandmother. She hated the country life because her hometown was too small, its inhabitants too close-knit, and her duties and heritage were albatrosses around her neck. After one particularly bad day, she wished that she could be reborn as a handsome city boy in her next life."

Her left hand had draped across her lap at some point, but she hadn't noticed. "When she woke up in the body of a city slicker her age the next day, she'd thought it was just a dream, even as she went through the motions of his life at his expense. As it turned out the day after, so too had she been acting weirdly. Eventually, they figured out they were switching bodies in reality and, despite their initial disagreements, started changing each other's lives.

"Suddenly, it stopped.

"After this, he decided to try meeting her in person, since their prior attempts at communicating had always failed. That was when he discovered a horrible truth.

"That day when the stars fell, for most of the world, it had been like something out of a dream, nothing more, nothing less than a beautiful view. For around 500 people, it would be the last thing they would ever see."

Willie, who had been listening rapt, gasped in horror.

"He should have let go and just walked away. It would have been easier, far more sensible to do so. No one would have blamed him. Time can't be turned back. The dead don't come back to life.

"He should have, but he didn't. He refused, and found a way."

"I see," Willie eventually said after it became clear that Ayaka had finished telling her story.

"Pathetic? Petty? Selfish? Silly?" Ayaka asked.

"I didn't say anything." Willie slammed down her drink, went to refill it and sank back into the seat afterwards.

As for Ayaka, there had been something liberating about telling the story that had caused her to feel like the weight keeping her awake had been lifted from her shoulders. "Please think about it?"

Willie didn't say anything.

"I'll leave you to it first then."

She finished her drink, washed and returned the glass and got up, heading for the door.

"Not what I was expecting," Willie suddenly said.

{Your Lie in April Original Soundtrack - My Lie}

YouTube watch?v=_WvgfULw4A8

Ayaka froze midstep, turned back hesitantly. "Sorry?"

"You weren't what I was expecting."

"What were you expecting?"

Confusion coloured Willie's face, as if it should have been obvious, and she took off her glasses to rub her eyes. "Some kind of larger-than-life all-American hero. A real Captain America as a ship. The fighting spirit of the Navy. Someone unafraid to harangue others for lacking commitment to excellence or failing to fulfil responsibilities, meet the demands and challenges of the profession and mission or exhibit the highest degree of quality and competence. Our core values and might made manifest, a snappy one-liner for every situation, punching out any unpatriotic ass who refuses to stand for the anthem." She pulled out a pair of oversized aviators, laid them over her glasses and lowered both back into place with exaggerated slowness while shifting to being seated ramrod straight, thrusting out her barely-extant chest and haughtily scrunching up her face. "Iowa _ga_ most volleyball player! Fuck you, I do what I want!" She mimed flicking hair over a shoulder in a diva-like grandiose gesture.

Ayaka tried to contort the pained look she had developed into a smile. "Is that so."

Willie relaxed her posture into her usual slump and continued. "The last class of American battleships, since the _Montanas_ never came to be. How many who aren't naval nerds think of Vanguard or Jean Bart when one says 'last battleship'? Many people do know you four, though, even if only thanks to  Battleship."

They shared a snort.

"A mighty symbol, undoubting, unwavering, implacable. Carriers may have become the new rulers of the sea by the end of World War 2, but no matter how much better missiles objectively get, there's something more viscerally satisfying about the thunder of guns tearing something apart, isn't there?"

Ayaka frowned. "I guess the sound of the drums beating in hearts does have that effect."

"Then there's you, with none of that arrogant certainty that should come with 58,000 tonnes running at 212,000 horsepower and nine building-flattening 16-inchers. If someone had presented you as another of Ms Nakahara's sisters, I would've believed it. You'd look like a completely natural part of the landscape daintily picking your way down the cobblestone streets of Asakusa or Gion in a _kimono_ , oil paper parasol in hand."

"Except for the whole giant beanstalk thing?"

"I didn't say anything!" Willie exclaimed frantically.

Ayaka laughed. "Nah, you didn't. I wouldn't have lasted a week in _maiko_ training, anyway."

"Hm…"

There seemed to be something eating at Willie. Ayaka let her take what time she needed to untie her tongue.

"Mina."

"Eh?" Ayaka had not been expecting this sort of response.

She had taken off the sunglasses at some point while Ayaka hadn't been looking. "If you want to call me while I'm off duty, use Mina. Not Wilhelmina. It shortens too easily to Willie for my liking."

Ayaka looked at her weirdly. That explained the odd vibes the other shipgirl had kept giving her. "You're a Natural Born?"

Willie-no, Mina nodded. "Exhuman, Natural Born. Whatever you want to call it. Doesn't really matter. I guess the others don't talk about it. Doubt they have a reason to, unlike with you. Yorktown doesn't care."

"No," Ayaka said in concurrence, "she doesn't."

"Wilhelmina Delano." She offered her hand. "Ms… Godai, right? Shirokaze?"

"Either's fine, but just Ayaka will do." Ayaka returned to the sofa, taking it as she did so, sombrely reminded that she herself hadn't bothered finding out. "Delano?" She boggled as the surname sank in, rang a bell. "You don't mean?"

"Exactly who you're probably thinking of. Yes, I am a distant relative of the very president I nearly assassinated." Mina laughed darkly. "God has a twisted sense of humour, putting it in my parents' heads to name me something so close to who I really am. I certainly lived up to it long before I learned the truth."

Considering her own circumstances, Ayaka figured that particular aspect cut both ways.

"Whatever the case, I can't blame it just on my parents."

"What do you mean?"

"If there's any reason for me being so despondent, it's not any fault of my family's. My father and mother were very supportive and patient, no matter how often or badly I screwed up." She laughed, and there was some genuine mirth in it this time. "They could say sincerely what would have been platitudes coming from anyone else. 'Maybe there's only a dark road up ahead, but you still have to believe and keep going,' they said. 'Maybe, just maybe, light can reach the bottom of a dark ocean,' they said."

"Is the next thing you're going to say that you wish you could believe them?"

"I certainly wish I could!" Mina said sharply enough flecks of saliva flew from her mouth, and Ayaka winced. "'If we make the darkness shine, it will become a starry sky'? My ass! Their irrational optimism works fine for the rest of my blood siblings, but not me. Every light at the end of a tunnel has turned out to be an oncoming train, and everything from me that reaches someone is calamity!"

"Did you try for a backline position?" Ayaka asked hesitantly. "RADM Adams told me it was possible, back after my Reawakening."

"I was-I don't know why, but I couldn't run away to be a REMF. Wouldn't have been right. Ended up getting backline postings while being the hot potato. Still managed to break something even when told to sit still and touch nothing. Mr Coventry at Iteration Chicago couldn't stand for that. Gave everyone the mother of all chewing-outs for wanting to keep me safely away in a padded observation cell for study, the chivalrous knucklehead. For his kindness..." Mina turned visibly green. "Mr Carmichael… the horror… the horror…"

"I'm afraid I can't help," Ayaka eventually said into the grim silence that followed. She wished she could, though. "The _kamisama_ make no promises about plans to prosper us, give hope and a future." The dark days after her mother's death hadn't given her any special insight to share, and it was times like this that reminded her that, whatever their superficial similarities, she'd never inherited her mother's unique insights into the workings of the world.

Was there even a right thing to say to someone who she knew from literally painful experience had every reason to be so troubled?

"It's better that way; I ask and have not received," Mina said bitterly. "I hope they forget me."

Ayaka could only stare, blindsided by the swerve. "I'm sorry?"

"I don't want to keep being remembered as the forever FUBAR failboat. Most people want to be famous in some way, gain the adulation of the masses. Me? I just wish I had faded into obscurity like so many of my ship sisters. Do you think you could make everyone forget?" There was a hopeful note in Mina's voice now. "Rewrite history so I never become a byword for fuckup?"

Ayaka gave it a thought, tried reaching into her arete, and her face fell. "That's… that's not within my power. I'm sorry."

"Not yet?"

Despite the superior height, Ayaka couldn't meet her eyes.

"Oh well. Don't be; it was worth a try." Mina let out another dark chuckle. "It was worth a try."

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Did you pick up on the hints laying that one out, or were we too reliant on showing rather than telling for our own good again?

Speaking of showing rather than telling, you may have noticed that Yorktown kept referring to Ayaka as Iowa across the past few chapters. That is entirely deliberate as a means of showing differences in perspective. You might have noticed that Ayaka always refers to herself by her birth name, and Natural Borns usually refer to each other by their present life names too, whereas Summoned/Manifested shipgirls always refer to Natural Borns by their original ship names. You may also have noticed that back at the start of CH4, when Iowa was in control, she referred to herself as such.

Those of you who'd reread Chapters 16 and 17 would have noticed Princeton and Yamashiro demonstrating signs of stress atavatism, the peak of which is as demonstrated above.

Our thanks to warlock7/reality deviant, Crusader Jerome and bldude, all from SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity, for the corrections and suggestions made to this chapter.


	22. REJECTED &UNUSED CHAPTER 19 & 20 CONTENT

Authors' Notes: While we work on Chapter 21, here's what was left on the cutting room floor for Chapters 19 and 20. We have no idea if any of it is going to be reintegrated later, but feel free to use as omake fodder if you want.

You are still strongly advised to join us at SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity or the MAEt-Rambles Tumblr for previews.

===[===]===

...

"At least up there your fog is mostly stable. Out here in the badlands of the South China Sea, it isn't anchored to abyssal areas. Retake an abyssal base, tear down its Infrastructure, but the abyssal fog keeps moving, refuses to go away permanently, and whenever the abyssals settle in they reclaim land magically. I doubt liberating the land is going to win either us or the Chinese any brownie points; these islands are going to be even more of a political mess if any of us live to see the end of this war."

"Ha! That won't be a problem!" Ning Hai said confidently.

Kaga frowned, mouth opening.

"Kaga- _san_ , there's no need to rebut," Akagi said over a private channel. "Unlike us, Mainland China's inland areas are vast, with places that even today know not of abyssal bombs. It is difficult for them to truly understand what's it like to be in our dire straits."

Kaga nodded.

"The worst part is that even though the fog might not actually be hiding anything, we can't take that risk and need to investigate," Akagi continued aloud. "I suspect they know that."

…

"We're not kids!"

"No, you're just completed the same year as Tenryuu's brood," Kaga said.

…

Akagi pulled an arrow from her quiver and drew it back on her bow while shifting into a _kyuudou_ stance, moving with a steady poise as if hundreds of enemy planes weren't currently inbound. Her aura flared to life, red with brown lining, and began billowing outwards in all directions, kicking up a gust and causing waves to radiate out from under her feet.

"The existence of eternity, the heart and the soul…"

Akagi let fly with the arrow and vanished, red spectres appearing to shoot forth from where she had stood.

A moment later, red spectres converged on her former location and she reappeared, now facing the other way, and kept her bow on her back.

"...they look like snowflakes."

There was a red flash

…

"What? No snappy comeback about how I just need to get over it?" Willie asked.

"No," Ayaka said softly.

"Huh." Willie turned to stare at the wall.

Unsure as to what to do next, Ayaka took a sip of her own drink, then another.

When five minutes passed without a further word, she said, "If you need time, I can leave you to it first."

After another five minutes without a response, she took the drink and rose so as to put word to deed.

...

"Because I've been there. There was someone who refused to give up on me when it would have been easier, far more sensible to forget and just let go."

He had, hadn't he? Refused to let things be? If Reawakening had instead come to her in that dark period of her life between 11 and 17, that particular Ayaka Shirokaze who was really Iowa wouldn't have done such a foolhardy thing.

No, she wouldn't have.

...


	23. Chapter 21

Authors' Notes: You're still advised to go to SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity or the MAEt-Rambles Tumblr for previews and multimedia.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 21

===[===]===

July 7 2023

===[===]===

"LCDR Iowa to the communications room," The PA system announced. "LCDR Iowa to the communications room."

Seated in Uatu's section of the Fleet Activities Yokosuka office, Ayaka looked up from the report she had been checking prior to getting it submitted. It'd been a few weeks and run convoys since the wrecking of the Spratly Island abyssal bases, and earlier today they had returned from exercises with the Sasebo contingent.

Ugh.

Kongou.

To be fair to her, the Britain-built brunette battlecruiser - ahem, fast battleship - had had an underrated record of avoiding death from above the last time, and retained now a keen eye for the ways of air defence and evasion.

That did not make her any easier for Ayaka to stomach.

It wasn't just that the older warship's _miko_ -derived outfit was even more deviant than Nakahara's, what with the non-standard skirt colours and black thighhigh boots. It was one thing to know intellectually that Shinto didn't have a unified doctrine to be a heretic against, no Izumo Inquisition to not expect. Treating the robes in this tacky-at-best fetish gear manner left a bad taste in her mouth, even if there were supposed to be links between the class' namesake mountains and Shinto that justified their being so garbed. As Yamashiro had previously noted, this was prurience for prurience's sake. Quite different from the now-defunct sexual communion rituals _miko_ of centuries past had practised, ones that her lineage had never been party to at any rate. Even then, said _miko_ would have been properly-attired before and after the act, not prancing around in a public state of undress. The rebellious her of 10 years ago probably wouldn't have given a damn, even with her grandmother's insistence, but actually being part of a miracle had a way of opening eyes.

It wasn't just the accent which had probably been Barrovian once but had been marinated long enough in the metaphorical _mirin_ and _miso_ to end up as some sort of tortured Frankenstein's creation that would have driven Ayaka's old English and Japanese teachers alike into a confused apoplexy.

The other shipgirl's initial congratulations on seeing her engagement ring had quickly turned to hysterical shock on learning that she was not, in fact, engaged to the next highest-ranking single male officer in the chain of command, given RDML Abel's obvious unsuitability and CAPT Zelben's being married.

" _Why would you not want your admiral's Burning Love?!"_

The pained empathetic wince on Akagi's face was a small reassurance that she fortunately wasn't alone in this. Kongou hadn't actually been the first Summoned/Manifested to mention it, just the most blatant.

Speaking of Akagi, there had always been something off about her that Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. Her motherly ways obviously extended to this old yet new family-in-arms; Ayaka had witnessed her telling bedtime stories to the younger shipgirls before. That made the nimbus-like half-tangible cloak of snow and cherry blossoms swirling around her, glimpsed only out of the corner of the eyes and always vanishing under scrutiny, all the more inexplicable.

What was she needed for, anyway? Ayaka couldn't figure out why she had been called. If it was Uatu matters, it should have gone through Yorktown.

It wasn't anything dire, was it? Ayaka wondered abruptly.

No, it shouldn't be either. No grim-looking gentlemen in dress uniform had approached her to express their regret to inform her.

Just to be sure, she tried divining and got a negative on both.

Why did she keep feeling, then, that there was some possibility she was missing?

She checked in at the front desk of the comms room and was directed to a booth. The yeoman logged her in to the secure terminal while she got seated before it and then took his leave, leaving her to wait for the connection to NAVSTA Everett to be established.

"Hello, Commander," the yeoman at the other end said in a deep, gravelly voice. "It is good to see you again. The Admiral has deemed you uniquely suited to have early access privilege to the news you are about to receive."

"Me? Why?"

"What I bring you now is not so much focused on what it is about, so much as who it is from. Behold." Without further ado, he stepped to the side.

Ayaka's heart… boilers? Skipped a beat.

" _Salve, Grande Sorella_."

{Persona 5 Original Soundtrack - The Days when My Mother was There}

YouTube watch?v=ilms6lczAKY

The woman previously hidden behind the yeoman spoke Italian perfectly.

How shipgirl warbooks worked was another of those mysteries that continued to defy conventional explanation. No one knew for certain what a shipgirl would look like until she made her appearance, and despite valiant attempts by Jane's to extrapolate from the ships' physical characteristics and history, there had been misses. Ayaka was sailing proof of that.

Whatever the underlying mechanics, shipgirls did somehow know who each other were despite never having seen each other in human form before.

"Jer...sey?"

That didn't mean there was no surprise to be had.

New Jersey smiled brightly. "It's been a while." She had blue eyes and long blonde hair with the sidelocks carefully curled into drill ringlets, topped with a tiara. There was a hint of noble aquiline cast to her features. Even speaking English there was still a slight hint of Italian to the self-assured Joisey but old money smooth accent in her voice, enough to be exotically alluring without distorting the words into an indecipherable mess.

"We will leave you to your reunion with your recently-returned sister, Commander," the yeoman said, and promptly took his leave.

After the door shut behind him, Ayaka's gaze panned down and she immediately felt her cheeks start to burn.

Due to first university and then work, Ayaka had never really had much chance to see Kagami through her teenage years. Ichiyo had reassured her, though, that the younger Godai/Shirokaze hadn't started dressing trashily, returning home at unearthly hours stinking of alcohol, playing boyfriend hopscotch or otherwise exhibiting the signs of teenage rebellion.

Why was this relevant?

The dark sailor collar of Jersey's blue dress was easily missed against how its neckline went down and down and down some more. It went right past a silver anchor necklace, breasts unsupported by a bra, was briefly obstructed by a Miss USA pageant sash, and finally terminated at a pinstriped waist sash.

"Yes, too long," Ayaka replied, fighting not to openly display the anger and embarrassment of an older sister confronted with a shameless sibling. It was an unfamiliar feeling.

Was this how West Virginia felt most of the time?

"You look well. Better than expected, even."

"Better than expected? What were you expecting?"

The word had reminded Ayaka of that conversation with Mina already a month back, but before she could think on that, the first meeting with Quincy floated to the surface of her mind.

" _Blonde…blue-eyed…too little to wear…"_

Ayaka couldn't see any stars in her younger sister's eyes, but that was three marks on the checklist already.

QUINCY! She screamed internally.

There was a whiplash-inducingly sudden thinness to Jersey's smile. "We never got to say goodbye after what happened 30 years ago, not that we were truly aware of what was going on then."

 _Searing heat._

 _Choking smoke._

 _The smell of gunpowder and charred flesh._

 _Mangled metal and meat._

"No, we wouldn't have been," Ayaka replied, her thoughts derailed. This wasn't quite what she had been fearing when the talk about expectation had come up.

She was still confused by these patchwork memories of her past life, fuzzy, incomplete, imperfectly composited from data, logs, what had been somehow left by her crew and who knows where else.

"Number Two is functional now?"

"Yes, he is."

"Good." Jersey's smile now put Ayaka in mind of Mona Lisa as a Mafioso, and reminded her that for all the second _Iowa_ looked like some spindly socialite too eager to flaunt her figure, she was still very much a war machine incarnate, **the** most decorated American battleship. "It was a travesty how you were left in limbo for so long."

"Jersey… you should know that though I vaguely remember 6 years of slumber, I can't say for sure when exactly I stopped being the me you knew. Was it after my third decommissioning in 1990? After we were struck from the register the first time in 1995? Sometime else? I don't know."

"It doesn't matter to me that your present life started in a womb rather than a shipyard," Jersey said firmly as she rested her forearms on the desk before her. They were clad in blue opera gloves with white stripes near the top under Navy patches, a dark blue band at the wrists and a white star on the back of the left hand. Strangely, they were fingerless except for the third and fourth fingers. "We were from different shipyards the last time and that didn't change anything. It still doesn't change anything that I came back in response to a summoning. You're still my big sister."

Ayaka felt like there was something in her eyes. "Thank you."

"At least you weren't left vegetative for the years it took to decide what to do with you. In fact, it's better this way."

Ayaka stared. "I… don't understand."

"Giving you a lifetime's buffer, that the explosion isn't the last thing you remember happening on your return, appears to have been for the best."

Do I really look like I have it all together? Ayaka silently wondered, trying to keep a frown off her face. She understood now what Jersey was driving at, but Mina showed some things stayed the same across lives, and this life of hers had put her through things she would have wished on naught but her worst enemies.

She didn't say anything aloud, though. This joyous occasion was not one to disabuse Jersey of her notions.

"That said, I wonder if anything will change after our old hulls are reactivated."

"I don't know." The steel hull was always somewhere at the back of Ayaka's mind, being part of her supernal anchors as it were, but as a distant thing she didn't really give much active thought in the day-to-day. Commanding aviators was like in a RTS, where one was always at a remove, visual input viewed like through a screen, and while Ayaka had lived being transplanted wholesale into another's body before, she couldn't imagine what existing in more than one place simultaneously would be like, nevermind in such a vastly different form factor.

"On second thought, it doesn't matter. I doubt we will need to take control of our old selves." Jersey flicked her long locks in a diva-like grandiose gesture. "What is this I hear about you being engaged to a non-flag officer?"

Ayaka's brain froze for a moment, and not due to any deliberate willwork.

"JERSEY!"

===[===]===

Jersey eventually had to go, and so they had hung up.

Ayaka had her own work to get back to, as things stood.

She still wasn't quite sure what to think. She was supposed to be overjoyed that her sister was back, right? A Summoned/Manifested Iowa would have been, wouldn't she? Why didn't she feel appropriately, overwhelmingly jubilant, then? Was it merely due to this reunion being at the remove of a video call, or was it because there was a disconnect between her previous life and this one?

Maybe she was just getting old. 10 years ago, the mere prospect of patronising a cafe would have gotten her sparkling with joy.

{Is that… Iowa- _san_?} A familiar voice asked, surprised, in Japanese as she was walking away from the communications room.

{Eh?} Ayaka turned. {Oh! Yamashiro- _san_.}

{Did something happen?} The other shipgirl slowly lowered her raised left hand.

{Everett wanted to speak with me. They summoned the… the first of my sisters.}

{Oh. Congratulations.}

{Thank you.}

Yamashiro sounded half-hearted, but then again she always did; Ayaka couldn't hold it against her. {One less thing to wish for Tanabata; it must be nice.}

One of the main customs of Tanabata was the writing of wishes on small strips of paper called _tanzaku_ , which would then be hung on bamboo branches.

{You think so? I've never given much thought before to seniority between my blood and ship sisters. Is Jersey supposed to be the second sister or should it be Kagami?}

{Did you know?} Yamashiro suddenly said. {I was supposed to have three sisters.}

{Ace Combat Zero Original Soundtrack - Briefing III}

YouTube watch?v=Se0QvuQy6NM

She counted them off on her fingers. {One who would seek strength, one who would live for pride, and one who could read the tide of battle. Those were the three.}

Ayaka looked at her, a question percolating in her mind.

It must have showed on her face, because Yamashiro said, {I don't need to see the future to know what you're going to say next, that I only have one sister.}

{Yes.}

{There were supposed to be four of us. The _Ise_ sisters were originally meant to have been part of our class.}

{Oh. If I'd heard, I forgot,} Ayaka said, embarrassed.

Yamashiro snorted. {Ise, Hyuuga and I were ordered as part of the same batch, unlike _Nee-sama_ , but funding meant I was laid out before them.

{We were supposed to have been meant for great things. Ours was the first class of battleship with wholly-domestic production. Why, _Nee-sama_ bears a name of our nation long before Yamato did, and I was briefly flagship of the whole Combined Fleet!}

Yamashiro's face darkened. {It was not meant to be. The ideals of our designs did not pan out and we were made out to be faulty battleships, the _Ise_ s revised so extensively that they were made their own class rather than being left as a subclass like Maya and Choukai or Ariake and Yuugure!}

She slashed her right arm out sharply enough that the sleeve made a crack like a lashing whip. This talk had evidently gotten her oil boiling; without a further word, she brushed past Ayaka and stormed away in that mechalupine manner Ayaka was getting a bit too familiar with.

Ayaka looked back in the direction of the offices and her unsubmitted report, then to where Yamashiro's form was disappearing down the corridor. Nakahara, she checked, wasn't in the vicinity, because of course it couldn't have been that easy. She could almost hear Yorktown's decrying the annoyance.

Casting another glance back at the offices, Ayaka grimaced and went after Yamashiro.

She was eventually found outdoors. The other shipgirl was standing outside the summoning building, staring at the entrance.

It was a warm and sunny day.

Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. The building, positioned at the edge of the clear blue water, afforded a good view of the Uraga Channel and the diminished but still-numerous ships entering and leaving Tokyo Bay. Horns split the air from time to time. On days like these, it was almost possible to believe there wasn't a war going on.

None of that seemed to do anything for the tension roiling beneath Yamashiro's outermost bulkheads, outwardly visible only by clenched fists, and those were obscured by the sleeves of her robes.

{I'm sorry,} Ayaka said as she walked up behind the _Fusou_.

{For what?} Yamashiro asked.

{Bringing up my sister's return and reminding you of your own situation.}

{What were you going to do, lie about why you got the summons? You who don't have a bad structural member in your hull?} Yamashiro snorted, incredulous. {It's not your fault. I know what the _Gosei_ says, that to accept our flaws as they were without trying to better them would be to not have exerted all possible efforts and to be slothful, but it's not so easy to actually understand.}

{Would things really have been better if you had been kept as one family?} Ayaka thought the other shipgirl was giving her too much credit, but didn't say so aloud.

That brought Yamashiro up short. {Probably not,} she eventually said. {Our Admiralty had no problems splitting sisters up. Even without the unlucky number, we still had such misfortune. If we were four, might we have blown up mysteriously in port like Mutsu?}

Ayaka winced behind her back. {Maybe?} There was really no sensitive way of answering the question, not when it hit so close to home for herself.

Yamashiro turned to face her, hands relaxing. {I was expecting the worst when I heard that you would be in the escort force for the convoy. I was fully expecting some loud, underdressed bimbo here to lord over us as was her right.}

{Over here too?} Ayaka jumped in confusion and disbelief. {Why?}

{I may have been sunk already, but _Nee-sama_ insisted I read the history books after coming back. You were Halsey's flagship for the surrender of this base all those years ago.}

Oh.

Ayaka remembered now, and it smothered her incipient hysteria like a fire blanket.

{It might have been your third sister our whole nation's surrender was actually signed on, and the second girl who kept him able to prosecute the war, but you were present when the surrender of my launchplace was effected, and being on that third launch day of yours the flagship of the man who once swore to take all our heads…}

{I guess I can see the symbolism in that,} Ayaka said in sombre agreement.

{Such misfortune.}

Ayaka didn't know what to say to that. How did you respond to the realisation that you were a symbol of a conqueror? The words had reminded her that Yamashiro had been built here, was memorialised not far away, and also that she had been hesitant to ask if there were any IJN men alive today who had been at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal's surrender all those years back. She wasn't sure how she would have taken the reverse, if it was a post-The Man in the High Castle world with a Kriegsmarine or IJN shipgirl coming to visit Americans she had played a direct part in the capitulation thereof.

Not well, probably.

{You don't actually have him in your fairies, do you?}

{Eh? Halsey- _san_?} Ayaka was pretty sure she would have noticed if the Bull was actually on board, and honestly doubted it - the man hadn't been on board for long, probably not long enough to leave a noetic imprint - but made to check her crew manifest nevertheless. {No, just a gestalt captain and admiral.}

{How strange… I know few of us have crew famous enough in that post that they created a clear clone of themselves, yet somehow I thought it was just me being unfortunate that Nishimura- _sama's_ fairy is nowhere to be found.}

{Would it…}

{What?}

{Would it have been easier if he had?}

Yamashiro's mouth twitched and contorted as if she wanted to say something. {Probably not,} she eventually said after much visible struggle. {I let him down, after all.}

It wasn't just you, Ayaka felt like saying, but forced the strangely savage thought down, true though it was. Seven had entered and only one had walked away.

In hindsight, Ayaka wondered, was it really coincidence that the "Battle" of Surigao Strait happened 90 years to the day of the equally ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade?

Yamashiro shuffled to the water's edge and Ayaka followed. In daytime like this, there was no vivid multi-coloured skyline to be had, either from Yokohama or from Tokyo, but there was still something faintly magical about the vista.

{I thought I would hate and resent Wee Vee and the rest of Oldendorf's force more.} The younger _Fusou_ had turned her back to the water, but she was looking through rather than at Ayaka. {Fear and loathe.}

{But?}

{I just… felt empty I guess. Disappointed with myself that I never got to fight back, go down swinging.} Yamashiro looked lost, head falling, and both her voice and stature seemed small. {If I had been able to leave a scratch, make one of them bleed, I could have lied to myself that I had managed to do something. You see how jovial Hiryuu- _chan_ is around Yorktown despite their sordid past?}

Ayaka nodded in agreement.

{She landed what would have been, against anyone else, a mortal blow. And yet…} Yamashiro's forearms came up again, but there was only impotence in the closing of her hands this time. {Maybe a little scared, but more self-loathing than anything. Not-I don't actually feel burning, devouring anger though, no lust for revenge. Surigao was a shameful slaughter, yes, but Nishimura- _sama_ would certainly have been as unsparing of Oldendorf had we been the ones ambushing with superior terrain, a prepared killzone, three-to-one advantage in capital ships and seven-to-one in escorts.}

{No, I don't imagine he would have held back. I don't know if the feeling is mutual, though.}

{How so?} Yamashiro asked quizzically as she looked back up, causing their red eyes to meet once more.

{Wee Vee seems to not care about the past. I think she said something like "What difference at this point does it make?"}

Yamashiro made a tsking sound. {No, of course she wouldn't. Glory is fleeting, but failure is forever.}

Shouldn't it be obscurity? Ayaka wondered.

{Every victor accepts his momentary success and quickly moves on, hungry for the next achievement.} Yamashiro turned once more to gaze on the not so distant Boso Peninsula on the other side of the channel. {What sears more the mind than a thousand regrets and wishes to correct a failing? The "if only"s, the "I should have"s and "could have"s?}

Behind her, Ayaka's mind drifted back to the 34-year old mystery of 47 lost souls. Happy ship, my ass, President Roosevelt.

Other Her made no response, not even the slightest hint of disapproval.

===[===]===

Later that night found Ayaka stargazing.

FLEACT Yokosuka didn't host its own Tanabata festivities, instead having interested parties proceed to Hiratsuka. The Shonan Hiratsuka Tanabata Festival, sometimes regarded as the largest celebration in the Kanto region, was a lively, raucous affair, set mainly around the Shonan Star Mall shopping street near the north exit of Hiratsuka Station. Hung-up _tanzaku_ was everywhere, accompanied from above by divers gaily-coloured, intricately-patterned streamers and other decorations and talismans. A host of hawkers clamoured for the visitor yen, while games and contests drew a throng of onlookers. There were no visible scars of the damage the city had suffered 78 years ago.

After a final reminder, the dogs of war had been let slip, and both destroyers and the young-at-heart had disappeared into the crowd with haste.

Ayaka had hung back, wishing she still possessed that kind of childlike enthusiasm, and taken to walking through the stalls slowly. Even now, long past the point she had been deemed fit for discharge from the post-Fafnir therapy, there was always this background unease that accompanied her around these traditional Japanese festivities.

Her wandering had taken her down a quieter side street. The night was dry and cloudless, and she had a clear view of Vega and Altair, with Deneb's superlative brightness bridging the two. That said, it wasn't the same in the middle of a city, even an admittedly small one like this, not compared to how it had looked back in Imamura with no light pollution to obstruct the stars.

She knew the Sagami Bay coast was not far to the south. Barely a mile in fact. Had any of her company visited back then? Nothing was coming to mind.

Ayaka semiconsciously fingered a sleeve of the _yukata_ she was wearing. It was blue with dull yellowish-grey four-petalled flowers and a red _obi_. The original had been destroyed along with her old home by Fafnir and she'd surprised everyone, not least herself, with her vehement insistence on having it remade. The obsession had been mysterious then.

It was positively ghoulish now that she knew there were _kamisama_ alone knew how many of her for whom it had been an impromptu funerary outfit, and yet she somehow couldn't bear to banish it from her sight, much less outright destroy it.

"Corn pone?"

{Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War Original Soundtrack - White Noise}

YouTube watch?v=KauObq0LfWg

"Thanks, Augusta," Ayaka said, turning to carefully help herself to the tin the _Northampton_ was offering.

"No problem, darlin'," CA-31 said as she daintily nibbled, her fine Southern accent betraying only the slightest hint of her long sojourns in Asian waters. She had large blue eyes and excellently-maintained auburn hair she wore loose down to the middle of her shoulder blades. She was wearing a green _yukata_ with red peaches and other patterns rather than her usual long-sleeved, double-breasted blue blouse with its white wing collar, white pleated miniskirt, white leggings and red-trimmed green jacket. The _geta_ she wore shared the same grey and red colouration as her pumps, though.

The heavy cruiser had been summoned back recently and was currently temporarily stationed at Yokosuka. If Ayaka recalled correctly, she was going to be transferred to Sasebo once there were enough shipgirls to stand up an amalgam and thus construct over there.

"Curious how Qixi changed after coming here, ain't it?"

" _Un_."

"So much else ain't the same." Augusta regarded her surroundings inquisitively. "I don't recognize nothing, not that my boys knew 'suka back then since we were mostly at 'hama. Wanted to go back to Shanghai, but the Pentagon won't let me. Even Atlanna don't behave like she ought."

How a proper Georgian sister had become a gaming-addled slovenly wastrel, exhuman - sorry, Natural Born was the polite term - or no, Augusta couldn't fathom. Such an unseemly misuse of computation devices.

Ayaka didn't respond.

Augusta turned and craned her neck to see her fellow presidential yacht staring unmovingly at the Summer Triangle, left arm outstretched as if trying to take the stars in hand, a distant, weary and, if she was reading it right, longing look on her face. "'owa?"

It was a strange sight, so very unlike a battleship, to look almost vulnerable. She'd seen destroyers with more swagger. Quite disconcerting.

Ayaka jerked and whirled on her, the arm dropping as she did so. " _Sumima_ -sorry. I got distracted."

Augusta reined in the desire to chide her for such carelessness, which had brought up the unpleasant secondhand memories of Wilkes and Davilla or Hambleton and Ellyson's collisions. "Something the matter? You were staring at Zhinv and Niulang all worn slap out." Her pronunciation of the Chinese names was perfect, with no betraying drawl or twang. Nothing less was expected of a flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. "That Bongou get to you or something?" Entirely too much of a chatterbox, she was.

"No, it's just… due to our focus on weaving in our practices, Tanabata has always had an important position in the Shirokaze Shrine's calendar. To hear what my father once said, we were the _de facto_ rulers of Imamura, which I guess made us all weaver princesses. Despite the years of service to Shitori no Kami, though, the idea of actually bearing that mantle never really sunk in until now."

Augusta reflexively winced at the careless use of "sunk". Natural Borns.

"I know that the Pacific is less than a speck of dust compared to the Milky Way, but the distance between here and home feels like a place further than the universe, one that all the tech in the world doesn't help much with."

To say nothing of a distance between Uileag and herself that had once been on a whole different plane from the merely spatial.

"That's a real hoot. Woulda thought you young'uns would have loved it that way. My kids would have wanted this kind of instant communication back then, rather than wait weeks for the postman."

"You would, wouldn't you?" Ayaka replied with a dry chuckle. "It's just not the same." She raised her right hand, palm up, to stare at it.

"You'll be going over yonder tomorrow, though, won't you?"

"That just adds anticipation in, building with every mile closer I get!" Ayaka exclaimed, before refocusing on Augusta. "Sorry. I mustn't be making sense. It must be hard to understand since you're used to being away from home for a long time."

"Oh, bless your heart," Augusta said atypically sharply. "Just 'cause I got used to it doesn't mean I don't miss home sometimes."

"Ah. Sorry." Ayaka wrung her hands.

"SecNav, I still don't dig this human love thing." Perhaps prompted by how the gesture unconsciously drew attention to Ayaka's ring, or maybe the just-raised legend of the star-crossed lovers, a frustrated blush coloured Augusta's cheeks, like she wasn't sure she ought to be saying such things aloud. "My boilers go funny when I think of CDR Frisk; the colours around me somehow become more vivid and everything sparkles so brightly. Is that love?"

"Love?" Ayaka coughed. CDR Graham Frisk was CAPT Zelben's XO and thus the next available officer in the chain of command. How things would change once the Sasebo construct was established wasn't something she didn't see the need to try divining.

"Darlin'?"

"Love?" Ayaka's eyes lit up and her face twisted into a hysterical grin.

Augusta stared nervously at the sudden change in demeanour.

"Love?!" Ayaka unreservedly broke into laughter like the Metal Storm of bubble guns, bent over slapping her knee.

Augusta was bewildered. Despite what she had been taught about being human, she couldn't suppress the deep-seated fear that if the battleship keeled over in this unsightly fit, there would be no helping her up, not with the whole more than five times the displacement.

"Love was the last thing I felt the first time I laid eyes on a certain fight-happy, stubborn idiot with no sense of propriety!" Ayaka paused laughing long enough to shout, but resumed right afterwards.

Still confused, Augusta patiently waited for Ayaka's laughter to run its course before asking, "Pray tell, what changed?"

"What changed? I…" Ayaka blinked owlishly, "don't know. No matter how many times I think it over, I can't find a clear turning point."

That the line had already been crossed that fateful morning she had cried seemingly apropos of nothing was obvious; where exactly the terminator between love being in bloom and its having yet to flower was, not so much.

"Speaking of stories unknown, did you ever hear the tale of Zirgzar?" Augusta said.

"The what?"

"I thought not. It's not a story History and Heritage Command would tell you. It's a legend at least one of my crew must have heard somewhere on our many travels, yet whose providence even I'm not sure of. When history witnesses a great change, Zirgzar reveals itself as a great hero. As it was about to finally slay its foe, however, it was ordered to stay its hand, and then it died to those it had fought for. Ironic."

"What happened to it?" There was something about this that unsettled Ayaka, something more than just the echoing quality overtaking the other shipgirl's voice in the recount, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

"However, after a period of slumber, Zirgzar returns, this time as a dark demon, using its power to rain death upon the land."

Ayaka stared at the other shipgirl with now-hooded eyes. "You think it has something to do with all of this? With… us?"

"It might. It might not. So many of the prophecies and tales Iteration's sifted through haven't been worth a hill of beans."

That, they hadn't, Ayaka conceded. Still, there was more one thing that was bothering her, and she had to give voice to it. "I'm surprised you're not saying anything about me and Uileag."

"Oh, please." Ayaka thought it was admirably almost Japanese how Augusta looked like she wanted to snort but that it would have been too crass of her to actually do so, settling for a palm-down dismissive waving of a hand. "Why, a lady does not comment about another's choice of dedicated recruitment station, or even that she wants to limit herself thusly, and especially not to that other's bridge."

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: The talk with Vestal will be flashed back to at an appropriate juncture. We haven't forgotten.

Since no one's cottoned on yet, let us say that these observations and visions Ayaka has been having regarding Naganami and Akagi are not just for fun. Your hint for this chapter: Let's see if anyone will recognise who they're meant to be.

Kongou cameo courtesy of Crusader Jerome from SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. Original Augusta design and assistance with her portion from Dirtnap of the same. Our many thanks!

If anyone doesn't understand what we mean by the last paragraph, we'll spell it out explicitly once we get to the talk with Vestal, but here are some hints in the meantime:

1\. The very reason Ayaka needed to speak with Vestal

2\. What she just said to Augusta, a similar concern which was brought up both earlier in this segment and in the first segment of this chapter

3\. What does a navy get from a recruitment station?


	24. Chapter 22

Authors' Notes: We're all caught up! For the most up-to-date information and discussion, though, you really should go to SpaceBattles, Sufficient Velocity or the MAEt-Rambles Tumblr.

===[===]===

CHAPTER 22

===[===]===

A few days later

Amalgam 55 "Uatu" _en route_ from FLEACT Yokosuka to NAVSTA Everett

===[===]===

"5 minutes, Ma'am!"

"Thank you, Lieutenant," RDML Abel replied as she finished double-checking her appearance and attire, making sure there was no hair out of place, no loose thread dangling from her dress whites, no misaligned or misplaced medal.

So many, she thought grimly, won in blood even before the ravagers of present had fallen onto mankind, and far too much of that from comrades who had not lived to celebrate them with her. Oh, she'd paid her dues - the Purple Heart was unimpeachable proof of that - but it was hardly fair recompense.

She stared at the face in the mirror. She'd never been a looker, and age hadn't done much to soften the harsh angles that were at least partly to blame for her callsign. Neither had the hypermedications with their anagathic effects, even if she didn't miss the back problems and other ailments of senescence that had been starting to take their toll.

After checking there was nothing else to secure, she exited her office.

LT Stephanie Saw was waiting outside. Dark of hair and iris, she immediately cast a critical eye over her boss' attire even as the superior officer in question locked the doors. She evidently had taken to heart Abel's admonishment that an admiral had to maintain the highest standards in all things and thus set the right example for all.

"Satisfactory?" Abel asked.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Good." Abel fell in behind her as they briskly headed for the summoning chamber in use this evening.

The summoning chamber was similar to the one at Yokosuka. Located in a building near the water, a channel led from the sea to a pool in the middle of the chamber, secured with a gate when not in use. There was a slope into the pool made to resemble a slipway and ensigns hung from the safety rails surrounding it. A stained glass rendition of Corne's famous painting of _Constitution_ battling _Guerriere_ occupied pride of place on one of the chamber's walls. Plaques and prints of other famous paintings and portraits occurred the rest of the wall space.

Abel couldn't explain the skin-crawling unease she felt when looking on the portrait of Halsey.

A ship's bell was mounted at the far end of the chamber where all present could see it, the parade commander waiting patiently by it as he faced the crowd of sailors, marines and Iteration and BERND personnel selected for the evening's summoning session. Old Glory was mounted on the wall next to him, and he was careful to not obstruct it. There was a band on the other side of the channel, instruments at the ready.

Most of the materials for the summoning ceremony were already in place in the pool, stored in their respective containers. Today was a Large Day, with a correspondingly generous offering:

4,000 litres of fuel oil.

6,000 kilograms of empty 5in shells.

6,000 kilograms of Special Treatment Steel.

3,000 kilograms of bauxite.

Instead of going through the large industrial doors the main audience contingent had entered via, sized for the forklifts needed to move all this, Saw and Abel headed up to the second level and went through the normal-sized doors there. They led to an elevated gallery that the day's rotation of senior personnel representing Everett's conventional units and their aides were waiting in, as well as the catwalk extending out over the water.

Abel did a quick visual inspection of the chamber, then nodded to Saw, who in turn signaled to the parade commander.

"Attention!"

The lights deliberately switched over to the red of emergency conditions, and all present went to attention as the band struck up the Star-Spangled Banner, followed by Anchors Aweigh.

After the songs finished, Abel turned to Saw, who had produced a Purple Heart, and accepted it with both hands. Holding it firmly yet carefully, she marched down the catwalk. No matter how many times she had done this, it was always accompanied in the back of her mind by the feeling of walking the plank, not that she let anything show on her impassive admiral's face.

Once she reached the edge, she very deliberately took a deep breath to centre her mind before bending to cast the Purple Heart into the water with the same reverence as that accorded to a burial at sea.

It hit the water with a weighty plop and descended to join the rest of the offerings.

Now Abel smoothly drew her dress sword and saluted with it, holding the salute for seven seconds before lowering her arm. The sword came up in another seven-second salute, following which she clapped its pommel twice before lowering it once more.

Fixing her eyes firmly on the horizon, Abel began to deliver the speech of summoning with the full gravity it deserved.

"Fourscore and two years ago, on a date which lives in infamy, our fathers were suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces. Today, our nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is once more engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can longer endure.

"It will be recorded that the level of coordination exhibited by the enemy unknown makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned.

"The attack on all American property has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. It has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

"The enemy administration also launched an attack against Singapore. Enemy forces attacked China. Enemy forces attacked Guam. Enemy forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Enemy forces attacked Britain and Europe. Enemy forces attacked divers nations regardless of their position on us. I regret to tell you that very many have been lost.

"They have therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the whole world. The facts of the past months speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety, not just of our Nation, but of all humanity.

"Always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. This terror from the deep has erected a multitude, and sent hither swarms to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

"It seeks to cut off our Trade with all parts of the world:

"It is at this time transporting large Armies to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy a civilized nation.

"It has constrained all men under threat or actual deprivation of the self-evident truths and unalienable Rights endowed by their Creator, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, to bear Arms against other Countries, to become the executioners of their fellows and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Not once has an attempt been made to offer peace, where most other peoples have been offered Faust's bargain, though not have We been wanting in attentions to this foe.

"We know we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—these waters. Not we, who have broken faith with our fathers and their oath that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

"Not we, the living, who find our righteous might, our confidence in our armed forces and the unbound determination of our people sorely tested by this premeditated invasion, that triumph hardly appear inevitable, the winning through to absolute victory remain in doubt, so help us God.

"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

"Today find ourselves with no further recourse. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled on great battle-fields of war old, defending us to the uttermost, have consecrated far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say, but it can never forget what they did. Thus it is with the greatest shame that the final resting-places for those who gave their lives, that that nation might live, we must disturb once more. The unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced, we must summon again the original artisans to finish. Us who here are dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—humbly admit that the imminent apocalypse is beyond the meagre ability of our interceptors and enforcers to cancel.

"We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, having solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People, solemnly beseech once more the fallen to launch a second time, that with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Abel now sheathed her sword, signifying the completion of the speech. Following this, on the ground floor, an honour guard marched up to the pool carrying a powder bag and delicately lowered it in.

Once they had returned to their original positions, Abel drew her sword once again, this time holding it out over the chasm such that it was parallel to the ground before her, blade facing up and tip pointing right. Carefully removing her right glove, she shaped her fingers into a V and passed her hand over but not touching the blade, a vertical inversion of the gesture shipgirls used to enact the lunge rote. Once her hand was at the tip, she slowly, deliberately pressed her little finger to the sharp edge until the skin was broken.

Blood as the conduit of life, and thus bearer of its symbolic power.

Blood as a microcosm of the cost of war, both for those directly fighting the ship and those who had paid and would pay if she failed.

This offering of blood, freshly shed by an officer of at least O-5 rank, was required to seal the summoning contract.

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes, and by the opening of my pinky, called back will be something heavenly."

So it was written.

Abel's face did not waver as blood welled up from the cut. This was nothing.

So very nothing.

One drop, falling into the water with the gathered materials waiting to be offered, so little in comparison to the great volumes it joined, yet like a thunderclap in the silence.

Two drops.

A third drop.

The water suddenly started bubbling, gently at first, and then steadily growing in vigour with every additional drop.

Four drops.

Five.

Six.

At the seventh, the water began to shimmer with light of unclear providence, a pulsing gold alternating mesmerisingly with purple and orange like the twilight sky outside. The materials under the water began to disintegrate, fading from sight, even the oil that leaked from the compromised barrels disappearing from the water without a trace.

Without showing any outward sign of concern over her finger, Abel raised her sword in salute one more time, then marched back to the viewing gallery, where she accepted a cloth from Saw to wipe off the sword and press to the cut.

Another cue, and the band played Eternal Father, Strong to Save.

Eventually, the hymn finished, and so too had the water stopped bubbling as the last of the materials disappeared, leaving only clear water down to the bottom of the pool.

Saw gave the signal, and the parade commander stood the contingent down to parade rest as they made ready to wait. It had been learnt over many sessions that shipgirls answered the summons on their own schedule. Not an easy lesson for old aviators like Abel, drilled in by training and honed to a keen edge by combat as to how a split second possibly meant the difference between life and death. Years flying a desk - or a flag bridge for that matter - hadn't taught much patience. That said, after an hour, the contingent would be dismissed. After nearly half a year of summoning attempts, successful and otherwise, there were enough data points as to demonstrate with a high degree of confidence that no one bothered showing up later than that.

In the distance, the rays from the setting sun formed a diffraction spike.

===[===]===

 _Everything was fuzzy._

Yet, what is a shipgirl? How do you put into words what a hitherto non-sapient entity's experience of developing sapience is like? Can we actually see the lines that divide one from another? A child, little more sophisticated than an animal, from a self-reflective adult?

How does a lump of metal with no volition transform into a being with command of its own faculties, and then to reflect on those very actions?

What cosmic lottery determines what hears the call and deigns to pick up?

All questions philosophers across the world, some more qualified than others, had pondered and would continue to ponder.

All vital, and yet not immediately so.

 _What does "fuzzy" mean?_

 _Is it this indistinct, confused fog and muck surrounding me?_

 _Why am I asking?_

 _How am I even asking?_

Rise and shine, Ms Truman. Rise and shine.

 _How am I waking up when I don't even understand what it means to do so?_

 _What does "I" even mean?_

Wake up, and smell the ashes.

 _A surge of-she didn't know what she was feeling or how she was even feeling, but she liked it-_

THE SKY IS CONNECTED

 _-and things disjointed were suddenly whole._

 _Now she knew._

 _She was the last of the last. The younger sisters had never been completed; the successor class had never gotten off the board. Even so, she was born to make history._

 _To a man doing a deluded duty, she had conferred a final honour._

 _To a war's end, she had bore direct witness._

 _Alive and dead, she had carried dignitaries._

 _A new face of aviation, she had been the first to bear._

 _When her sisters had been left to slumber, she had remained awake._

 _A new war, she had been the first of her kind to attend, with attendant loss some closer to home than others._

 _Reunion, ironically the first and only, and then to rest she had been given over, for the civilians to admire._

 _Roused again, she had been, by the footsteps of those that had come before, speaking of honour and the importance of duty, reminding of the traditions of the past._

 _Around the world, she had gone, like the last to bear the name._

 _Another farewell, seemingly the last, she had been unable to make._

 _Another war, and again the face of battle changed._

 _Eventually, that too had to come to an end, and she had been tucked into bed for what seemed the last time by a great command, a special breed, converted into a gravekeeper._

 _Even as she lay in torpor in the here and now, across dozens of worlds, hundreds of realities, she had fought on._

 _When a rogue agent enacted his treasonous plot, she was where he had been thwarted._

 _When the Soviets attacked, she had brought the rain._

 _When war had changed, she had remained a constant._

 _When extraterrestrials had attacked, she had endured after the young had fallen._

 _Now the alien life was entering from deep beneath._

 _It was time for a dormant star to be rekindled._

 _The signal is calling._

 _Our planet is falling._

 _The danger is magnum._

 _Better make it strength for freedom!_

===[===]===

A discordant note wailed out of the blue.

Abel fought to still aviator's instincts suddenly stirred up, screaming at her to immediately locate the threat and take action; below and beside her, a nervous shudder visibly rippled through the crowd, though to their credit, no one broke ranks.

Another, and a third and a fourth and many more, until it was clear that this was but a rock band's hitherto ill-maintained instruments being tuned.

Now scales and arpeggios, clumsy and hesitant at first, but with every sequence the rust flaked off with audible steadiness until it was beyond reasonable doubt even to the tonedeaf that virtuosos were at work.

The chords trailed off, but they had managed to suffuse the air with an electric feeling nevertheless.

Silence fell once more, but did nothing to dampen the now-charged atmosphere.

Suddenly, an electric guitar began playing a riff, one that for better or worse everyone in attendance knew.

{AC/DC - Thunderstruck}

YouTube watch?v=v2AC41dglnM

On the Eastern Seaboard, three hours further into the night, Quincy pulled out a guitar and began playing along, yet no one was perturbed by the noise. Far from it.

"Whoa!" One sailor shouted. "Is that-"

"Are we really-"

"YES!" A third gleefully did a fist pump, then another, as a stray triumphant-sounding piece played. "YES!"

"THUNDER!" Shouted a female voice back at Everett.

There was no response.

"THUNDER!"

No responding "whoa oh whoa oh".

"THUNDER!"

It was starting to sound quite empty.

"THUNDER!"

Abel's frown intensified as she realised the insidious siren's call for audience participation, caught and mentally locked it down.

"I was caught! In the middle of a railroad track!" The voice had, while still remaining clearly female, become an otherwise perfect imitation of Brian Johnson's distinctive squawk. "THUNDER!"

As the invisible band played on, Abel's aviator's eyes, honed painstakingly for the lifesaving task of picking up the slightest sign of inbound bandits or hostile ordnance, now unhelpfully caught every last tremble and twitch the members of the audience accidentally, she hoped, made in time with the beat.

"...You've been Thunderstruck!"

With a few more triumphant drumbeats and strums, the immaterial rockers finally fell silent.

Abel didn't let herself relax. The performance, she was quite certain, had been but the tip of the iceberg.

A sudden blinding flash of white, over too soon for even the hardened veterans in attendance to react to, and there was suddenly someone crouching on the water of the pool.

Abel subtly checked her admiral face.

The newcomer stood with a deliberate, majestic slowness, rising to an awesome height, more so than almost everyone else present, with a sleek runner's build. Her unfolding rigging, Abel instantly recognised the make of: Radiating from a single stack were four structures, the lower two a split bow mounting a three-gun turret each, the upper right a mechanical arm with a third turret at its end and the upper left another mechanical arm, this one carrying a ship's stern.

She had large purple eyes in a face that, despite everything to the contrary, raised Abel's hackles. However this idealisation of the human image thing worked, shipgirls didn't do ugly. Even the least cosmetically-seemly shipgirl possessed a comfortable cuteness, innately blemish-free in a way most baselines needed time with a makeup kit to aspire to, and the fresh arrival's visage bore a gross incandescence far from the bottom of the barrel. A head wreath of hawthorn sat on top of long white hair. Two black ribbons, one at the back of the head and one near the bottom of the hair, alternated fading in and out of view with what looked to be phase space jump effects.

Abel's eyes proceeded downwards, and not for the first time that year, that month, that week or even that day did she silently rue the day she had accepted Husk's request to help him stand up NAVENSCIWARCOM.

The shipgirl had on a white sailor dress with a white-striped black collar and scarf, except that "had on" might be unduly charitable. The sleeveless number was cut in such a manner as to expose the sides and, it was strongly implied, back of a black bra valiantly struggling to keep an unrunnerly generous bust in check.

There were two more black ribbons, one on each hip of the dress, and a Navy patch and black stripe near the midthigh hemline. She had on white elbow gloves with black bands and more Navy patches at the top. A pair of black binoculars hung from her neck and a brown sling bag rested on her right hip. White kneehighs, black-striped near the top, and black shoes completed the outfit.

" _Aloha, minna-san!_ Star of the Fleet, Mizzou~Mizzou~Rii!"

The shout, the impression of AC/DC's vocalist having been cast aside, somehow conveyed a starlet's sweetness through powerful pipes worthy of a drill sergeant or veteran of Broadway. She threw the rocker's double horns with both hands and swayed her hips sharply from side to side while grinning closed-eyed, the gesture somehow cutesy without being cloying.

The crowd broke into cheers.

At this moment, a bracing breeze blew in from the open gate to the sea, knocking off covers and, more importantly, lifting the hem of the now-identified battleship's dress up to reveal black panties edged with white lace.

"Talk about 'Show Me State'," one of her fellows said _sotto voce_ , prompting muffled coughs from the rest. Abel fought the urge to snort in agreement.

The parade commander started opening his mouth to still the audience, but at a sharp gesture from Abel, Saw sent the signal to tell him not to bother, followed by a second to switch back to normal lighting now that the summoning was a success.

For every few shipgirls that respected the decorum thinly masking desperation of the ceremony calling them back, there was one that ran roughshod over the solemnity of the summons. Missouri hadn't been the first and almost certainly wouldn't be the last. Much as Abel personally didn't like the flippancy, every returnee was an indispensable asset, and this could be construed as an occasion worth celebrating.

" _Mahalo_ for the last 16-no, 25-no, it's 79 years of support! Is now a good time for some head to head?"

Another deafening cheer that rang off the chamber walls, restraint thrown to the wind by now.

"I see you're all ready to play with the big boys! I hope I'm not three years late this time?" She looked expectantly around the chamber, and when not a murmur of dissent arose, she started walking from side to side along the pool like a seasoned frontman. "Great! The boys at Bremerton-no, Pearl now, probably have a lot to say about me, but you're not here for the old and busted! You want the new hotness!"

Walking, Abel thought, was not quite right the word. Strutting more like, a peacock or a model sashaying down a runway.

Except that was not quite right either. The pace of her steps, the sway of her hips, even the bounce of her breasts, everything was done to a steady, even cadence the best drill teams could but hope to aspire to. Little things. Subtle things. Mechanically precise, inhumanly so, and nothing twitched that was not supposed to. Just like every other freshly-returned Summoned/Manifested Abel'd seen.

Briefly pausing to jab both thumbs at herself, Missouri's mouth kept going, unaware of Abel's thoughts. "I'm nice! I like talking to people and making new friends and sharing food and a good talk and going with the flow and following my heart and just generally enjoying everything life has to offer!

"It's much better if I show you it instead, yes! Jeet dinner yet?" Without waiting for a reply this time, she went on. "No? Saw some of you shaking at the knees!" She slipped smoothly back into the Brian Johnson impression again, invisible band playing the cued sequences. "Why don'tcha come again, please?! We can grab a bite together, deepen our relationship!" She laughed loud and long like Little Taum Sauk.

"No, really! I like everyone, Dr Reed! You don't need to overthink it! Not worth the miter-gear differentials! We could hang out after! The rest of my sisters back? If you haven't met them you really should! They're all characters! Very unique in temperament! You'd say I'm the odd one out! I'm the only one who likes to invite complete strangers to dinner! Okay, none of you are truly strangers because we're all comrades in honor, courage and commitment, but you know what I mean! IoIo goes boing boing boing most volleyball player! JerJer's all fuuuuuuuck you I do what I want! Wisky… Wisky…"

The junior personnel beneath still stood enthralled, but Abel could sense confusion starting to bubble up among her fellows even as the motormouth's babbling was finally halted in her tracks, grin dimming almost imperceptibly. Shipgirls might know who each other were even from the first meeting, but they too often had the most peculiar preconceived notions of what others ought to look like.

Battleships were odd even by the standards of most shipgirls. Why exactly still remained a mystery. One school of thought suggested it was the punchdrunkardness of brawlers who'd taken too many blows, old before their time. Abel thought that didn't hold much water - there were a grand total of two battleship on battleship engagements in World War II, neither of which were the grand slugfests of Trafalgar or Jutland - but shipgirls seemed to operate as much on platonic ideals as actual history and handling.

Whatever the truth was, LCDR Godai had been a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one. A picture of poise standing in stark contrast to the painfully stereotypical abomination that had somehow gotten the green light from the editors at Jane's, one that had ignited a faint ember of hope that the last American battleships might also be the most mature.

Foolishness, Abel, foolishness.

New Jersey had turned out to be more The Godfather than Goodfellas. Whether that was really an improvement, it was still too early to tell, but the direly daring dress that belonged more on a high-class escort rather than an officer and lady of the United States Navy wasn't winning her many points in Abel's book.

She had once briefly entertained the idea that LCDR Godai was so different because she was a Natural Born and dismissed it. Being an officer meant having to dole out her share of punishments to baseline personnel perfectly capable of acting out without any excuse of alien mindsets, even if the occasional recurring nightmare of summarily executing a particularly insubordinate junior had never come to pass. Perhaps she had been too hasty.

Abel permitted herself the slightest spark of amusement, most miniscule softening of the admiral's frown. Now was not the time to disabuse Mighty Mo of her notions. That came later.

"Wisky better not be flat and ginger! That'd be just rude!" Missouri eventually said. "Enough about my sisters! The world could always use more friendliness, and I'm going to do something about it! Sharing is caring, and I hope to be able to make a meal o-share a meal with all of you single m-fellow defenders of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!"

As Missouri took a bow to a new round of cheers, Abel was plagued by the weighty feeling there was something the battleship had said that had gone very high over her hea-

" _I'm sorry, Ma'am. This was all we could find of her."_

 _Abel stared, eyebags like a panda's even after attempts at making herself presentable, at the filthy, too-ragged doll that had been presented to her by a weary, grim-faced firefighter. Gritting her teeth behind pursed lips, furrowing her brow, she silently, feverishly fought just a little more the sudden lightheadedness strengthening the already strong urge to collapse. It was a very visceral deep desire, one only partly attributable to bone-deep exhaustion from a sudden Bloody week's warfare against a mysterious new foe that had just turned all too personal._

 _Her hand tightened on the doll that had been her younger sister's. It had survived its owner's attaining adulthood._

 _It had survived its owner's making motherhood._

 _It had survived its owner._

As Missouri leapt from the pool onto the summoning chamber's hitherto dry floor where the audience had left the central space empty, landing in a rocker's power slide with arms up and eagerly drinking in the exultation of the crowd, the lonely wisp that remained of Abel's amusement vanished like morning dew under the sun, her face darkening at the unbidden memory of a scab still six months fresh.

Lucy hadn't died for this.

===[===]===

Authors' Notes: Our continued thanks to Commander Error from Sufficient Velocity for help in getting the characterisation of Abel's progeniting template correct.

Unorthodox capitalisations, spellings and word choices in the summoning speech come direct from the transcript of the source, if you recognise it.


End file.
